Reading a wet Wednesday in a Somerset dining room
Rain on the A38 does not cut covers evenly. It cuts the 12:30 sitting first, then the early evening two-tops, while the regulars who walk from the village still arrive.
Field notes
Pages written after the extracts, not before.
These notes stay with food and beverage demand: sittings, keg lag, marquees, and what a till file must contain. They are not essays about office productivity.
Why cellar pulls lag behind covers by two days
A busy Saturday at the tables does not empty the same kegs on Saturday night. The bar often pours the delayed demand on Monday, when the kitchen is already ordering as if the week were quiet.
Catering Saturday: how a marquee distorts the à la carte forecast
Guaranteed numbers for a wedding do not leave the dining room empty. They leave it oddly full of two-tops who refused the function menu and still expect the fish.
What a till extract actually needs to contain
A PDF of yesterday's Z-read is not enough. We need item lines, sitting times, and the voids the floor already knows about.
Bank-holiday ice cream and the empty fish special
August bank holiday does not lift every line. Puddings and soft drinks jump; the expensive special often sits, because families share plates and skip the middle course.