Marlowe & Finch Front of house · Service
Front-of-house tablet

The whole room, on one screen.

Tonight's service at a glance — every table, where it's up to, and the three things the floor needs to act on right now. The tablet surfaces; the floor decides. Run by Priya Sharma, Manager

Covers booked tonight
52
Of 60 seats · dinner service
Tables seated now
7 /8
One 2-top still to arrive at 20:15
Alerts active
3
One allergy, one pacing, one prompt
Regulars in tonight
4
Drawn from guest profiles

Tonight's service

Tanjong Pagar · Tuesday dinner · 60 seats. Notes pulled from the guest record.
T12 covers Mains
Pacing52 min
Regular · 3rd visitBarramundi en papillote away, drinking the Adelaide Hills chardonnay. On track for dessert.
T24 covers Ordered
Pacing14 min
First-time table. Two on the Wildflower wild ale, snacks landing — Coffin Bay oysters and the goat's curd.
T35 covers Seated
Pacing5 min
BirthdaySophie Lim's party — menus down, no order yet. Lamington soufflé pencilled for the cake moment.
T42 covers Mains
Pacing40 min
Regular · 6th visitDaniel Goh — the porter-and-duck regular. Manuka-smoked duck with the Bridge Road Robust Porter, as always. See prompt below.
T58 covers Ordered
Pacing22 min
Large party. Venison Wellington for two ×2 ordered for the table, Barossa Shiraz by the bottle. Watch the kitchen pacing.
T64 covers Dessert
Pacing18 min wait
PacingLamington soufflé ordered 18 min ago — a soufflé won't hold. See pacing alert below.
T72 covers Seated
Pacing4 min
Tree-nut allergyAisha Rahman — tree-nut allergy on file. Taking orders now. See allergy alert below.
T86 covers Paying
Pacing1 h 46
Regular · 4th visitBill requested. Turning for the 20:15 walk-in — clear and reset.

What needs you now

The tablet flags it. A person on the floor acts. Nothing here is automated.
Allergy
alert

T7 — keep the smoked ocean trout away

Aisha Rahman (T7) has a tree-nut allergy on file. The smoked Tasmanian ocean trout is plated with fermented bunya nut, and the charred broccolini carries macadamia — both tree-nut. Flag the order before it reaches the pass; check with the guest and the kitchen.

Surfaced to Priya · taking T7's order now
Pacing
warning

T6 waiting 18 min on dessert

The lamington soufflé for T6 was fired 18 minutes ago and a soufflé won't hold. This is exactly the timing slip guests called out in a recent review — get Marcus to confirm the fire, or send word to the table.

Surfaced to Marcus Tan (sous) · echoes review follow-up
Service
prompt

Tommo to T4 — porter-and-duck regular

Daniel Goh (T4) is in on his 6th visit — Manuka-smoked duck with the Bridge Road Robust Porter every time. A good table for Tommo to drop by; the floor decides whether and when.

Suggested for Tommo Finch · guest preference, uc06

Where this connects

The floor isn't an island — but the server stays in charge of the room.
Draws from

Guest preferences

Regular status, the usual order and any allergy come straight off the guest profile — the same record the booking and CRM tooling keeps. That's how the tablet knew Daniel's porter and Aisha's tree-nut flag before the order was taken.

Guest profiles · UC06
Feeds into

Review follow-up

A pacing slip caught on the floor — like the T6 soufflé wait — gets logged against the service, so if a review later names it, the follow-up tool already has the context. Issues are surfaced live, then carried forward, not lost at the pass.

Review-response triage · UC04

The floor stays in charge: the tablet surfaces preferences, allergies and pacing — it never speaks to a guest, fires an order or comps a table on its own. Every prompt is for a named person to act on or wave away.

Under the hood What this is today — and where it should go next

This screen is a read-only floor view: it joins tonight's bookings to the guest record and shows table state, a simple pacing timer (time since seated, or since a course was fired), and any preference or allergy note already held against the guest. The pacing maths is plain arithmetic against typical turn and course times — there's no model speaking to guests and nothing fires automatically. The interesting work is making it sharper without ever taking the human out of the loop.

On the roadmap

  1. The walk-in greeter. Add the host-stand flow from the use case — a QR self-check-in, an honest wait estimate from current pace and party size, and a PDPA-compliant "we'll text you when your table's ready" SMS. Recover the 2-tops that walk away at the door when Priya can't man it.
  2. Live pacing, not a stopwatch. Learn real turn times by party size and course, so the soufflé warning fires from how this kitchen actually plates tonight — not a fixed threshold — and the floor gets a nudge before a guest notices, not after.
  3. Allergy checks at the point of order. Cross-match every line against the dish allergen list as it's keyed in, so a bunya-nut or macadamia plate heading for a tree-nut table is caught at the table, not at the pass. The server still confirms with the guest.
  4. Multilingual greeting and notes. Greet and text in English, Mandarin, Bahasa Melayu and Tamil, and disclose bot status — the room's languages, handled at the door and on the floor.
  5. The floor stays in charge. Every step surfaces and suggests; a named person acts. The tablet never talks to a guest unprompted, never fires a course and never comps a bill on its own.
Full use-case write-up — the problem, benefits and vendor landscape: UC14 — Front-of-house tablet → Concept mock-up — illustrative data, not a live system.