The story

Twenty years in restaurants, most of them on the floor and in the office at the same time. I owned Wilton Pizzeria in Creedmoor, North Carolina, sold it at the end of 2023, and moved to running catering for a restaurant in Chapel Hill. That kitchen does about 200 catered events a year, from a boxed lunch for twelve to a buffet for three hundred, and every one of them starts the same way: an email, a headcount, a date, and a question about what it'll cost.

For years the answer came out of venue software with a spreadsheet beside it. The software made a proposal. The spreadsheet did everything the software didn't: how many pans, how many chafers, what goes in the van, what the kitchen makes on Thursday versus Friday. The two never agreed, because I typed the numbers into both. And the software cost more every year for the same features, plus a cut of every card payment, and the day I stopped paying, my customers and my history stopped being mine.

So I wrote down what I actually needed a program to do, in the order a job actually happens, and built that. One inquiry becomes one event. The event carries the menu, the menu carries the math, and every document the job needs prints from it with the same numbers on every page. It was tested on real jobs, in a real kitchen, by the people who had to pack the van from what it printed. When the pack list was wrong, they told me, and I fixed it before the next one.

It's for the caterer who does it all: the proposal, the shopping, the cooking, the drive, the invoice. Pay for it once, keep your data on your own machine, and go back to the kitchen. What that turned into as a set of promises is on the next page.