One basket, five kitchens, five different waits
A guest buying tacos and a matcha should queue once and pay once. What that actually means underneath — and the part no software fixes, which is that five kitchens cook at five speeds.
The thing a food hall sells that a restaurant does not is choice across counters. The thing that makes it annoying is queueing at each of them.
So a hall basket lets a guest take tacos from one kitchen and a matcha from another, pay once, and carry one number. Underneath, that is not a second kind of checkout. It is the ordinary checkout, run once per kitchen, and then grouped.
Why it is built that way round
Because every kitchen ends up with exactly the order it would have had if the guest had walked up to its counter. Its ticket, its lines, its takings, its end-of-day, its cost-of-goods. Nothing downstream has to learn about halls.
The group records only what the guest experienced: one basket, one payment, one number to show.
Three things that had to be decided
A shared tip has to split to the penny. If a guest tips on a basket spanning three kitchens, the tip is apportioned by what each kitchen actually sold, and the parts add back to the whole exactly. A penny that disappears here is a reconciliation argument nobody can win.
A kitchen that refuses takes only itself down. If one counter has closed between the guest loading the menu and pressing pay, the guest is told which kitchen and why — and the orders already placed are kept, not rolled back. Food is already on those screens. Cancelling it silently is worse than an incomplete basket somebody can see and sort out.
A deal across two counters is worked out once, over the whole basket. Each kitchen's checkout can only see its own lines, so "a taco and a matcha for £8.50" is invisible to both of them individually. The discount is calculated across the combined basket and each kitchen is handed its share, apportioned by what it contributed — so one kitchen is not quietly funding the other's offer.
The part software does not solve
Five kitchens cook at five speeds. Tacos in four minutes, a slow-cooked thing in fourteen. One basket does not make the food arrive together, and nothing in our system pretends otherwise: each kitchen's ticket starts when it is placed and is ready when it is ready.
That is an operations question, not a software one. Some halls buzz per kitchen and accept that a table collects twice. Some brief their fast counters to hold. Whatever you choose, choose it deliberately — because the single number on the guest's phone will imply a single moment, and the pass will not honour it.