The service journal
Practical writing for UK restaurant operators — service speed, menu engineering, kitchen systems and the compliance you cannot skip.
Guides
Opening a restaurant in the UK
Everything you must do before opening a UK restaurant: food business registration 28 days ahead, HACCP, premises licence and DPS, allergen labelling, VAT, tips law and EPOS setup.
Read the guide →Allergen compliance
What UK restaurants must do about the 14 allergens, Natasha's Law for PPDS food, and the FSA's 2025 written-allergen-information guidance — plus how to hold it all in your EPOS.
Read the guide →UK tipping law
The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 requires UK restaurants to pass on 100% of tips and keep a written policy and records. What that means for your till and payroll.
Read the guide →How to choose an EPOS
The questions that actually matter when buying UK restaurant EPOS: total cost including card fees, contract length, hardware ownership, offline behaviour and data export.
Read the guide →Articles
How to shave minutes off ticket times during a rush
What actually slows Friday service — and what changes the night you ditch paper tickets.
The night the Wi-Fi died (and the kitchen kept moving)
Why offline-first isn't a checkbox feature — it's the difference between a saved night and a refunded one.
Menu engineering: design choices that quietly raise check averages
Six tiny details we keep seeing in the menus of restaurants that consistently outperform.
Split bills are the user-experience battle you keep losing
The check is the last thing your guest sees. Here's how we redesigned splits so servers stop dreading them.
A wine bar's playbook for friction-free service
A practical playbook for training a small team in days and keeping weeknight service friction-free.
Anatomy of a great kitchen display screen
What most kitchen display screens get wrong — and the details that make an expo line flow.
Plating, photography, and the menu page that converts
A 20-minute photoshoot rewrites your average ticket. Here's the lighting setup we recommend.