Recently, I saw a tweet from a techie who was surprised to find waiters at a local restaurant noting down orders on an iPod Touch. There were more surprises in store for him. His next tweet said “before I even settle down in my chair, the order is on the table!”

Restaurants and hotels going high-tech is not news any more. There are restaurants that have been leveraging new technology to speed up their service.

In the pre-tech era, waiters would grumpily jot down your order, slowly saunter into the kitchen and yell out whatever you ordered to the chefs. How soon you got what you ordered was anybody’s guess. Moreover, whether you got it at all on the table depended on whether the kitchen manager understand exactly what the waiter yelled out.

Many hotels started using PDAs (personal digital assistants) more than five years ago. The waiters in one of the hotels I used to frequent, used their PDAs to note down orders which would be manually synced with a similar device in the kitchen. The kitchen supervisor or manager would track the order and tick off whatever has been sent to the table.

Now, there are apps such as Digi Waiter (for iOS) that enables waiters to take orders directly from the table and send them to the kitchen and bar.

With Digi Waiter, waiters can take orders, print bill and always keep handy the important information the customers may ask: gluten-free meal, origin of meat, etc. It also helps to increase table turnover and customers satisfaction.

For Android too, there are apps such as waiter.io. It claims that “within seconds a customer's order can be logged using the intuitive interface. The app is recommended for any server, of any restaurant or bar, who doesn't want to fumble around with pen and paper.”

What these types of apps do is to sync the order taken by the waiter on the handheld with another device in the kitchen - in real time. Unlike the old PDAs, where the waiters had to go to the kitchen every time to sync the order, these apps do away with the hassle.

Many apps go one step forward. They also sync with the terminal in the billing section. Once the customer’s order is completed, it can generate the bill. Apps such as waiter.io can be used as a Point of Sale (POS) kiosk cashier.

If you think this is great, wait. There are apps customers can download in their mobiles that can be used to order food in a restaurant.

For instance, getWaiter has two apps - one for the customer and one for the establishment. The customer end of the app ensures the customer getWaiter! means you don't have to wave your arms around or struggle to catch the waiter's eye. You can order food sitting at your table. There is no need to call the waiter or wave your arms wildly to catch his attention. And it lets you give feedback by rating the venue.

Once you are seated at the restaurant, you have to scan the getWaiter code in the table and order stuff. And when you have finished, pressing another button sends a message to the billing section, so that they can prepare the bill.

But there is a catch. The staff of the restaurant you are visiting must also have the app installed in their mobile phones. If they have, getWaiter helps the restaurant with “an addtional suite of insight reports all designed to show the key drivers of service and performance of the bar, restaurant or hotel. This dashboard of reports can be viewed online and are available as a one off purchase or on a monthly retainer”.

Unfortunately, not many restaurants can use apps such as getWaiter as it involves acceptance by customers also. Unless big restaurant chains adopt them, there is no way individual customers are going to download the app and keep checking for restaurants that are compatible.

Till then, simple order taking apps like DigiWaiter that require only the restaurant or hotel to have them, can make our restaurant visits happier. The time taken by waiters to communicate to the kitchen for each of your orders and once again for the billing - are cut down by a large extent. And it is good to see Indian hotel and restaurants adopting the latest technology to make the waiters’ as well as our lives easier.

dinakaran.rengachary@thehindu.co.in

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