Pizza Volante — Restaurant Technology Platform
A complete ordering, management and signage platform running two pizzeria locations in Italy, in production every day.
- 2
- restaurant locations in daily production
- 0%
- per-order commission vs. delivery platforms
- <60s
- from admin price edit to every TV screen
- 25+
- API endpoints powering the platform
The Problem
A two-location pizzeria in northern Italy relied on phone orders, paper menus and manual price updates. Every menu change meant reprinting; kitchen staff transcribed orders by hand; the owner had no visibility into sales. Off-the-shelf platforms took commission on every order and offered no control over branding, signage or hardware.
The Solution
I designed and built a commission-free, self-hosted platform covering the full journey: customers scan a QR code and order from a fast multilingual PWA; orders hit the kitchen instantly via Telegram notification and automatic thermal-receipt printing; the owner manages menus, prices, photos, sales analytics and staff from a secure admin dashboard; TV menu boards in both restaurants are driven by Raspberry Pis that pull live prices from the same database — an edit in the admin panel is on every screen within 60 seconds.
Architecture
- Customer PWA with offline-first service workers and installable manifest; also packaged as a Capacitor mobile app.
- REST-style API layer (25+ endpoints) for menu, orders, sales, gallery, printing and notifications.
- Order pipeline: place_order → notification queue → Telegram bot webhook + print-pull queue consumed by a Raspberry Pi print bridge driving a thermal printer.
- Digital signage: Raspberry Pi 3B+ per TV, boots into Chromium kiosk with watchdog auto-restart; polls the menu API every 60 s; falls back to cached prices on network loss.
- Multi-branch support via a branch parameter across API and signage; night-surcharge engine with owner-configurable hours.
- Admin hardening: session auth, trusted-device management, login rate limiting.
Key Features
QR ordering & live tracking
Customers order from their table or at home and follow order status in real time — no app store required.
Admin dashboard
Menu editor with bulk actions and image gallery, order queue, sales analytics with printable daily summaries, user & device management.
Instant kitchen notifications
Telegram bot messages plus automatic thermal receipt printing the moment an order arrives.
Live TV menu boards
Kiosk-mode Raspberry Pis render animated menu screens with live prices and automatic night-surcharge switching.
Multilingual & SEO
Italian/English i18n, structured data, sitemaps and PWA installability for organic discovery.
Offline resilience
Service workers keep menus browsable and signage rendering through network drops.
Technology Stack
Lessons Learned
- Restaurant staff are the harshest usability testers: the admin UI went through several rounds of simplification until zero training was needed.
- Print reliability matters more than any feature — the pull-queue design (printer polls the server, not the reverse) survives NAT, IP changes and restarts.
- Kiosk devices must assume failure: watchdog loops, cache fallbacks and auto-recovery turned the Pis into appliances the owner never thinks about.