A whole restaurant on one Mac — till, kitchen display and QR table ordering, free and offline.
Mise is a complete restaurant system that runs on your own machine. A till for the floor, a display for the kitchen, a back office for the menu and the numbers, and a page your guests reach by scanning the code on their table.
It is free, MIT licensed, and built with Flutter and PocketBase. No account, no subscription, no per-terminal fee, no cloud bill — and nothing to cancel. Because the server sits in your restaurant rather than someone else's data centre, the till keeps taking orders when the internet goes down.
The floor at a glance: tap a table to seat a party, tap it again to pick the bill back up. Items go on with their modifiers and a note for the kitchen, then to the pass with one press.
Settling handles the real cases rather than the tidy one. Part payments accumulate until the bill is covered, so a table splitting four ways works. Cash keeps what was handed over separate from what came off the bill, and works out the change. Card and mobile take a reference. Discounts need a reason and are recorded against the name of whoever gave them.
Tickets appear on the pass the moment the till sends them — sized to read from across a hot kitchen, not at arm's length.
The clock starts when the ticket was fired, not when the bill was opened, because a table can sit with drinks for an hour before ordering food. Cards age from neutral through amber to red against a ten-minute target, and the oldest sits first so the kitchen works the front of the rail.
Tap an item to walk it queued → cooking → ready. One press plates the whole ticket; a second hands it to the floor and clears the card. Allergy notes get the loudest treatment on the card, because a missed one is what ruins a dish.
Guests scan the code on their table and get a menu on their own phone. A web page — nothing to install, no account, no app store.
Their choices land on that table's bill unsent, and a waiter fires them. A stranger on your wi-fi cannot put food on the pass, and the floor stays in charge of what is real.
It runs on your own wi-fi. Nothing is exposed to the internet.
Menu with photos, categories, modifier groups and prices. Tables and zones. Staff with five roles, each described by what the person actually does. Receipt printing over ESC/POS to any network thermal printer — no driver, just an address.
Shifts open with a counted float and close with a counted drawer, and Mise tells you whether you are short. Reports show the day's takings broken down by item, by who served it, and by hour, with a CSV export for whoever does your books.
Some of the work is in what it will not allow.
A bill total cannot be edited — it is worked out on the server from the items, your tax and your service charge, so a tampered terminal cannot change what a bill costs. A discount cannot exceed the bill. Your last owner account cannot be removed or switched off. Money cannot be taken against a cancelled bill. A manager cannot reset an owner's PIN.
And changing a price today never changes yesterday's bill. Every order keeps its own copy of what things were called and what they cost.
On your machine, in one folder, and nowhere else. No telemetry, no analytics, no phoning home. Back it up by copying the folder. Uninstalling Mise does not touch it.
macOS for now. Windows and Linux build from the same source but are not packaged yet.
Unsigned, so macOS asks you to right-click → Open the first time. Mise is free and does not pay Apple's $99 a year for the certificate that removes that. The source is public; you can build it yourself.
Guests order over your wi-fi, not from home. Public online ordering would mean exposing your machine to the internet and giving up the offline guarantee — a deliberate choice, not an oversight.