Hospitality Display Systems
Overview
Host is a kitchen display system built for two settings: fine dining, where a table's courses have to leave the kitchen together, and high-volume service, where tickets come through continuously. Orders reach the screens directly from the till. LogicLeap co-developed Host with chef Lucas Selby, and the data model is built around stations, courses and a pass. The current build is version 2, a ground-up rebuild.
The Challenge
Host covers two kinds of service from one product. Fine dining runs by course: a table's dishes are held and fired together across sections, with the pass deciding what leaves. High-volume service runs by rate: tickets need to be on the right screens as they are rung through, with nobody waiting on a refresh. The orders themselves come from the till rather than being typed into the display system, which is what the POS integration is for. Version 2 is a rebuild from the ground up rather than an extension of version 1.
What We Built
V2 is built on Next.js 15, with Prisma over the database, NextAuth for sign-in and Docker for packaging. Order updates reach the screens over Server-Sent Events, backed by Redis. SSE is a one-way server-to-client stream, which suits a screen whose job is to receive, and Redis is the fan-out layer, carrying events across server processes rather than confining them to whichever process holds a given connection.
Orders come from the till. Host integrates with Epos Now using OAuth for authorisation and webhooks for delivery, so orders are pushed across as they are taken rather than polled for. LogicLeap has built this class of integration before, linking RezControl to Epos Now for Palé Hall, a five-star Welsh hotel, so the booking engine and the EPOS held the same picture. Different product, same territory: hospitality systems that have to agree with each other while service is running.
The schema runs to 13 models, among them restaurants, locations, stations, devices, tickets, courses and routing rules. Restaurants and locations are separate models, as are stations and devices, and routing is a model in its own right rather than a field on an order. Station views are configurable per kitchen section, so a screen carries that section's work. An expo/pass view sits across the stations for front-of-house coordination.
Tech Stack
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