Writing a recipe

One recipe serves a server, a cook and your records. The editor is arranged in that order — what the dish is, then what it is made of, then how it is made, then how it is kept.

Nothing is live until you publish. Save draft is safe at any point, and a draft is visible to your team and never to the line.

The basics

• Type — Production (a dish a guest orders) or Prep (a building block used inside other recipes). See Prep.
• Title — what your team calls it. This is what a cook searches for.
• Default station — where this is made. It drives the Heart-of-House grouping and your dashboard’s per-station breakdown, so an unset station shows as Unassigned rather than being wrong.
• Description — the guest-facing sentence. This is the one shown in the Front of House view, so write it for a server reading it aloud.

Menu sections (front of house · up to 2). A dish can sit in at most two sections — enough for something that is genuinely both (a starter that is also a shareable), and few enough that a menu does not become a dish appearing in six places. Sections are managed in Recipe groups.

Ingredients

+ Add ingredient adds a row: a quantity, a unit and the ingredient itself.

The picker searches your shared catalog, and offers Create ingredient or Create prep for something that does not exist yet — so an empty catalog never blocks you from writing your first recipe. Allergens come from the ingredients and roll up automatically; you do not tag them here. See The ingredient catalog.

Quantities are what separate the two views. A Front of House screen shows the ingredient names only; Heart of House shows the amounts. Both come from these rows.

Procedure

+ Add step adds a numbered step. Each step carries:

• the instruction — one action per step, written as an instruction rather than a description. A cook is reading this with their hands full.
• a station — Default (unassigned), or one of your stations. Setting it per step matters for a dish that moves: fry, then pantry, then pass.
• a control point — No control point, CCP — food safety, or QCP — quality spec. See Food safety.
• a photo or video — Add photo or video attaches media to that step.

Step media is worth more than a plated photo for anything with a technique in it. “Fold until it looks like this” is a sentence that has never worked.

Front of House extras

A separate block holds what front-of-house staff need beyond the description — selling points, tips to sell, and optional upsells and pairings — plus a Signature item marker. Its own note explains the split: “What front-of-house staff reference — no measurements.” See Front of House fields.

Plated result

Presentation and Quality check describe the finished-dish standard, and are shown in every view — the one part of the recipe that both a server and a cook see identically, because “is this right to send” is the same question for both.

(A reference photo for the plated result is coming; the fields are text today.)

Saving and publishing

Save draft commits without changing anything the line can see. Publish or submit… opens the decision — see Getting a recipe onto the line. If your role is Creator the button reads Submit for review instead, because publishing straight to the line is an approver’s call.

⚠ A recipe is frozen while it is in review — including for brand admins — so that what an approver is looking at cannot change underneath them. If you need to change something mid-review, it has to come back to you first.