The prep cook taps in.
She lets herself in the back door, taps her four-digit PIN on the kitchen tablet, and she's on the clock. No binder, no paper sheet. The schedule already knew she was coming.
All industriesRestaurants · live at Fancy Fork, Regina · five beats
Tuesday at Fancy Fork.
Run the whole restaurant. From one login. Fancy Fork is a fine-dining room in Regina, Saskatchewan — and our first restaurant. One service, open to close. The screens are the shipped product; the day is a composite of real ones.
Play this epicNothing gets shouted.
Table 5 orders the tasting menu. The ticket fires straight to the kitchen display — coursed, timed, allergy-flagged. The espresso machine hasn't even warmed up yet.
The system notices what nobody did.
Every dish fired at lunch quietly consumed its recipe from stock. Now dinner prep starts, and the count says demi-glace is at 0.8 litres — with Friday's reservations heavy. It flags it now, not at 6:40 PM.
The cofounder that never clocks out.
While the room is full, the AI that lives inside the system reads the same numbers the owner will see tonight — and speaks up on its own when something matters.
The numbers beat the owner home.
He counts the till against what the system already knows, closes the day in four steps, and locks up. By the time he's on his porch, Tuesday is on his phone.
AAmira K.Prep · 7:00 – 3:00CLOCKED IN 6:45
MMia R.Server · 10:30 – close
123456789
1× Amuse — beet tartare
2× Course 1 — bisque
SEAT 2: NUT ALLERGY2× Course 1 — bisque
— empty —
— empty —
Demi-glace0.8 L / 6.0 L
Arctic char7.4 kg / 12 kg
Butter, cultured13 kg / 16 kg
Heads-up while it's quiet in the office: Friday's tasting menu is your highest-revenue item and your lowest-margin one — the char course is carrying a 61% food cost since the last vendor price change. Want the ingredient breakdown?Reading: sales · recipes · vendor invoices
Yes — and what would a $4 price move do?
Counted cash$1,240.00
Expected cash$1,238.50
Variance+$1.50
Day closedDONE
Fancy Fork — Tuesday closed. $4,812 · 61 covers · labour 27% · till variance +$1.50
Benefits
What it does for the room.
Kitchen sees it instantly▶
FIRE · T52× Duck confitin prep1× Halibut — no dairyflaggedCourse 2held
Inventory counts itself▤
FEFODuck legs−2 on fireCream 1Lexpires first, used firstLow stock2 flags queued
Close-out in minutes$
Till: balancedCounted$4,182.50Expected$4,182.50Variance$0.00
The kitchen sees it as you tap it.
Orders land on the kitchen display the second they're sent — with allergy flags and course timing, no paper tickets to lose.
Kitchen display+Tickets appear the second they’re sent, grouped by station and course.Allergy flags+A no-dairy note travels with the dish — bold, red, impossible to miss.Course firing+Hold the mains until starters clear — one tap fires the next course.
Stock burns down with every plate.
Recipes deduct ingredients as dishes fire — first-expiring stock first — so counts stay honest without a clipboard.
Recipe consumption+Each dish fired deducts its exact ingredients from stock.FEFO stock+First-expiring stock gets used first, so waste shrinks on its own.Low-stock flags+When the duck legs run low, tomorrow’s order list already knows.
Close the day, not a spreadsheet.
A four-step closeout counts the till against expected takings — variance shown to the cent before anyone goes home.
Guided closeout+Four steps — count, compare, note, done. The same ritual every night.Variance to the cent+Expected vs counted, to the cent, before anyone goes home.Day report+Sales, labour and voids on one page you can read in bed.
Two screens decide whether a service costs you money.
The line, where a missed ticket becomes a remake — and the close, where the drawer either matches or nobody ever finds out why. Everything else on this page is convenience. These two are the margin.
The line, where a remake is the whole margin.
A ticket that sits is a table waiting, and a ticket that goes missing is a dish cooked twice and sold once. The screen sorts itself by how long each ticket has been waiting, so the oldest is never the one nobody noticed.
- Tickets age in front of you. A new ticket turns amber at five minutes and red at ten; one being cooked turns amber at fifteen. The kitchen is not asked to remember which came first.
- Allergies are a red band, not a note in the corner. They sit above the line they belong to, on the screen the cook is already looking at.
- One cook owns a dish at a time. Starting it puts their name on it, so two people do not quietly cook the same thing.
Kitchen · Fancy Fork
Kitchen displayActive 7Needs cook 3Cooking 2Ready 2
T5Table 5 · Ticket #41811m ago · Dine-in · Mia | 1× Tasting menu, 2× ScallopCOOKING
T2Table 2 · Ticket #4214m ago · Dine-in · Bilal | ⚠ Allergen: peanut — 1× Pad ThaiNEW
—Ticket #423 · Takeout2m ago · 2× Char siu · Note: no corianderREADY
Oldest waiting11mAmber past 15m
Remakes today0Nothing lost off a docket
Avg ticket8m 40sFire to ready
The close, where the drawer stops being an argument.
Most nights end with somebody counting cash and comparing it to a number they have to work out themselves. Here the till already knows what it took and how. You count once, and it tells you the variance — four steps, and none of them is arithmetic.
- Variance is calculated, not estimated. Opening float, ending count, declared tips, and the difference — each on the record, against a named shift.
- Digital tips are already counted. Nobody re-keys what the card machine settled, which is where the errors used to come from.
- A short drawer has a name and a night attached. One shift short by two dollars is a rounding error; the same person short every Friday is not, and now that is visible.
Terminal · End of shift
End of shift1 Shift2 Drawer3 Tips4 Review
Review Z-report
Mia H. · closed 22:41 · Saturday
$Opening floatCounted in at 16:00$100.00
$Ending cash countCounted by Mia$423.55
!Cash varianceAgainst what the till recorded−$2.15
%Declared cash tipsDigital tips counted separately$78.50
What you get
What a restaurant switches on.
Three tiers, and no surprises in the bill: what every Mangrove product comes with, what dining rooms, cafés and takeaway needs on top of that, and what else you can switch on. Mangrove for Restaurants includes all of it — you never pay per tool, and there is no module you have to buy.
Comes with every Mangrove product7
HomeTeamTasksWe run itDocumentsAlertsAudit logSettings
What restaurant or café needs17
DevicesOrders & POSKitchen DisplayFloor plansMenuCatalogRecipesInventoryCustomersSchedulePromotionsReportsAnomaliesAI usageMoneyMarketingWe run itReservationsSoon
Switch on any time, at no extra cost3
Command CenterFilesEvents & bookings
Add-ons cost nothing extra. They are separate only because most businesses of this kind do not switch them on in the first week.
Need something none of these do? The studio builds it — same team, and we have done it before.
The awkward hour
The day doesn’t go to plan. It rarely does.
Software demos well on the happy path. What decides whether you keep it is the hour it goes wrong. These are four that happen to a restaurant, and what happens next.
The kitchen runs out of pork belly.
Every dish fired consumed its recipe from stock, so the count fell all afternoon in the open — flagged at 2:30, not at 6:40.
A cashier needs to void their own mistake.
They ask for a manager PIN on the spot. The void goes through, and the manager’s name is the one on it.
The line goes down mid-rush.
The till keeps taking orders on the tablet it is already running on and settles up when the connection returns.
The drawer does not match.
Takings by method are already known. You count once, and it tells you the variance instead of asking you to find it.
Pricing
One rate, per person who logs in.
A dining room turns over its staff faster than almost any business there is. This is priced per person who logs in — at a rate mainstream restaurant software charges in about thirteen months — and there is no setup quoted on top of it.
$450per user, per yearThe subscription for Mangrove for Restaurants. One rate for everyone who logs in, billed annually.
What it covers
- Everything described on this page
- Every module listed, switched on or off as you like
- Support 12 hours a day, 5 days a week
- Setup, updates and hosting of the software itself
- No implementation project — you are running the week you sign
Extras, only if you ask
- 24/7 support — $1,500 a year
- The AI tier — $2,500 a year
Not included
- Card processing — your processor’s own rate, paid to them
- Hardware — this runs on ordinary ~$170 tablets you can buy anywhere
Buy a year at a time and renew, or buy several years up front — renewal pricing is confirmed with you at renewal. The 24/7 option is the service previously called Premium, not a second charge on top of it. Your data exports whenever you want it.
What it’s worth
The price is the easy part.
What software like this is worth is not a number we get to invent. Below is what other people measured, with the source on every one — set against a $450 bill.
$450per user, per year — everything on this page
- $1.23a day, per user
- 41venti caramel macchiatos, spread across twelve months
- $0to set up, and no implementation project to schedule
$7.23returned for every dollar spent on business systems — measured on software that bills per user and quotes the setup on top. Ours does neither.Nucleus Research, 2014 — five years of their own ROI case studies ↗36%of the average founder’s week goes on small administrative tasks — invoicing, data entry, chasing paper.Time Etc, 2023 — 251 US entrepreneurs, reported in Forbes ↗45%of small business owners lose a full day a week or more to people paperwork alone.Oasis, a Paychex company, 2019 — study of nearly 300 US businesses ↗
Read those as figures for this kind of software, published by other people — not as measurements of Mangrove for Restaurants. Two of the three come from companies that sell a remedy for the problem they measured; we have named all three, and dated them, so you can weigh that yourself.
$7.23 back on a dollar is a ratio, and the dollars underneath it were much larger dollars. Mainstream software at a typical $35 per user per month is about $420 a year for each person who logs in, and quotes the setup on top of that. We are not going to pretend the ratio multiplies cleanly onto a smaller bill; nobody has measured that. What we can say is which half of it we control. Per person, we made the denominator $450 — and there is no setup line under it.
Where the hours actually come back
Stock counts itself as you sell.Every dish fired takes down its recipe, ingredient by ingredient. The weekly count becomes a spot-check.
The rota and the timeclock are one record.The labour number is what people were actually paid for, not what you planned to pay — so payroll is a review.
The AI cofounder reads the numbers first.It watches the same records you do, all week, and speaks up when something moves — cheaper than finding out at month-end.
Everything above · $450 per user / year · no implementation project