A restaurant runs three technology systems at once: the till taking orders, the kitchen screens receiving them, and a row of delivery tablets doing both again from outside. Restaurant IT means keeping all three talking during service, and keeping the till selling when the internet is not.
What is specific to restaurant IT rather than retail IT?
A shop completes a transaction at the till. A restaurant starts one there and then has to deliver it somewhere else. The order has to reach the kitchen, the kitchen has to signal that it is ready, and the whole loop repeats for every delivery platform separately. That makes the connection between front of house and kitchen the part that hurts most when it breaks, which is not something a retail setup has to think about.
Service hours are the other difference. A restaurant's busiest period is the worst possible time for a technical fault and the least likely time for a supplier to answer. Our page on retail and restaurant IT covers the ground the two sectors share; this page is about the parts that are only F&B.
What happens when the internet goes down mid-service?
What happens when the internet goes down mid-service is the question to ask any point-of-sale supplier before signing, because the answers differ enormously. Some systems keep taking orders and card payments offline and reconcile when the line returns. Others stop entirely. If nobody has checked which of those you bought, a street-level fault becomes an evening of writing orders on paper.
The engineering answer is two internet lines with automatic failover, which we size against what du or e& can actually deliver to the unit. The operational answer is knowing your POS behaviour in advance and having a written fallback the shift manager has practised, rather than discovering it during a full restaurant.
How should kitchen display screens be set up?
- Wired connections to kitchen screens wherever possible, because kitchens are hostile to Wi-Fi.
- Screens and mounts rated for heat and grease, not office monitors in a hot line.
- Power that is not shared with kitchen equipment that cycles heavily.
- A paper printer as a fallback, so an order still reaches the kitchen if a screen fails.
- Clear separation between the kitchen network and guest Wi-Fi.
- A spare screen or tablet configured and ready, because service cannot wait for a delivery.
How are delivery aggregator tablets managed?
Most Dubai restaurants run several delivery platforms at once, each with its own tablet on the pass. That row of tablets is usually the least managed technology in the building: consumer devices on guest Wi-Fi, charging from a shared extension, with nobody responsible for them until one stops taking orders.
Treating them as business equipment fixes most of it. A dedicated network separate from guest Wi-Fi, proper powered mounting rather than a tangle of cables, coverage measured at the pass rather than at the door, and monitoring so a tablet that has dropped off the network is noticed before a missed order. Where volume justifies it, an integration that pushes aggregator orders into the POS removes the re-typing and the errors that come with it.
What does each area of a restaurant need?
- Front of house: tills, card terminals on their own segment, and a reservation system reachable from the host desk.
- The pass: kitchen screens, aggregator tablets, a fallback printer, and coverage that actually reaches it.
- Kitchen: wired connections, equipment rated for the environment, minimal wireless dependence.
- Back office: rotas, supplier orders, stock and payroll, backed up and separate from the POS.
- Guest areas: guest Wi-Fi limited so it cannot affect payments or the kitchen.
- Storage and delivery door: CCTV coverage and a network point if stock devices are used.
How is a group of restaurants kept consistent?
Groups get expensive when each site was opened by whoever was available and configured differently. Same POS, three menu structures; three networks built by three contractors; four people who know a password. Supporting that costs more than supporting twice as many identical sites.
The fix is to decide the standard once and apply it at every opening: the same network design, the same POS configuration, the same logins and roles, the same fallback procedure. Multi-location support then covers all sites on one agreement, and a new opening becomes a repeat of a known build rather than a fresh project.
Tills that survive a Friday service
We assess during service rather than at nine in the morning, because a restaurant at lunch and a restaurant when empty are different networks. That shows where coverage actually fails, what the POS does when the line drops, and which single fault would stop you taking money.
Projects are quoted as a fixed scope, from AED 2,500 to AED 30,000 depending on requirement. Support is a fixed monthly fee with written response times and a 24/7 helpdesk, which for F&B is the whole point, because the hours that matter are evenings and weekends. Engineers attend on site across Dubai.
Where a restaurant sits inside a hotel, the first job is establishing which parts of the network belong to the property and which to you, which we cover on the hotel IT page. And if you are still fitting out, the cabling to the pass and the kitchen is the one decision that is genuinely expensive to change later, so it belongs in the fit-out scope rather than in a snag list.
If you are weighing the decision behind this rather than the support, our guide on what happens when the internet dies mid-service goes into the detail an assessment would cover.
Frequently asked questions
That depends entirely on which point-of-sale system you bought, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming. Some keep taking orders and card payments offline and reconcile later; others stop. We establish what yours does, then design failover and a written manual fallback around the answer.
Usually because they are consumer devices on guest Wi-Fi, with coverage measured at the front door rather than at the pass. Moving them to a dedicated network, mounting and powering them properly, and monitoring them so a drop is noticed fixes it in most kitchens.
Where your POS supports it, yes, and it removes the re-typing that causes wrong orders at the busiest moment. Whether it is worthwhile depends on your order volume and which platforms you run, so we look at both before recommending it.
Yes. The helpdesk runs 24/7 and engineers attend on site outside office hours, because a restaurant's problems happen in the evening and at weekends. Planned work is scheduled between services rather than during them.
Before the kitchen and ceilings are closed. Cabling to the pass and the kitchen, network points and access-point positions are far cheaper to decide on a drawing than to retrofit around finished surfaces, and the internet line has the longest lead time of anything on the list.
Simpler in some ways and harder in others. There is no guest Wi-Fi to separate, but everything depends on aggregator tablets and the connection, with no walk-in trade to fall back on. That makes two internet lines and monitored devices more important rather than less.
Written by Srinivasan Ramachandran, Founder, Listonics · Last reviewed October 8, 2026