KDS: How to Cut Dish Ticket Times

A guest is waiting for a hot dish while a stack of paper tickets sits on the pass. One is stuck under a sauce container, another was misread, a third never came out of the printer. Any venue in Tbilisi or Batumi knows this picture on a Friday night. Ticket time is not only about how fast cooks work; it is also about how order information reaches them and whether the kitchen sees the whole picture.

Where time is really lost

• The order arrived late. A waiter carried the paper over, or walked to the other side of the room while the order waited to be sent.
• Nobody knows what is urgent. Paper tickets do not show how long an order has already been waiting.
• No split by station. The hot line, cold station and bar all get the same slip and pick out their own items.
• One table's dishes come out at different times. The salad is waiting while the main is still on the stove.
• Mistakes in the order. Modifiers like "no onion" get lost in poor print.

What a kitchen display (KDS) gives you

A Kitchen Display System replaces paper tickets with a screen that shows orders as cards. According to RestIQ's feature description, cook screens can be set up per station (kitchen, grill, cold station, bar), with timers and audio alerts. The main benefit is that cooks see the whole queue, not a single slip.

A practical rollout checklist

1. Split the kitchen into stations. Decide which dishes belong to the hot line, cold station, grill and bar. Each station should see only its own items.
2. Agree on target times. Set a separate benchmark for each dish group; a salad and a steak cannot share one standard. These are your own numbers and are best set from what your kitchen actually does.
3. Teach the team the color signals. If a card's timer changes color, the cook needs a clear action: "yellow means cook it next, red means tell the chef."
4. Assign someone to the pass. The person who assembles a table's order before it leaves sees what is missing and stops servers from taking dishes piecemeal.
5. Review the shift after closing. Look at which items were delayed most often and ask: is it the recipe, the prep, or the station's load?

A worked line of reasoning (illustrative)

Suppose burgers are constantly late in the evening. The screen shows cards sitting on the grill for a long time while the cold station sends its items out on time. So the problem is not the floor or order entry but the overload of one station. The fix may be simple: move bun and sauce prep to before the shift, or put a second person on the grill at peak. Without a screen you would have to piece this together from cooks' words and servers' impressions.

Common mistakes

• A screen but no rules. If nobody marks dishes as ready, the timers show nonsense.
• Too much information. Do not overload the card: a cook needs the dish, modifiers, table number and time.
• Ignoring the data after the shift. The screen helps in the moment, but real improvement comes when you review delays calmly the next day.
• No fallback plan. Decide in advance what happens if the internet drops. In RestIQ the POS and KDS work offline and sync when the connection returns.

How RestIQ helps

In RestIQ, KDS screens show order cards, cooking steps from tech cards and routing by station. Wolt and Glovo delivery orders land on the same screen without re-entry, so the kitchen works from a single queue. Department printing is also available if a station prefers paper. KDS is included in the Pro plan; see the features page for details and the pricing page for plans.

Bottom line

Ticket times improve through a visible queue, clear rules and a short review after each shift, not through shouting in the kitchen. Start with one simple step: split orders by station and agree a target time for your most frequent dishes. The rest will follow as you go.

14 days free: request a RestIQ demo and see what a kitchen without paper tickets looks like.