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Mantel

A white-label operations platform for restaurants and bars in Ecuador, from the floor to the SRI. Built for one room first.

The brief

One system for the floor, the kitchen, inventory and cost, the digital menu, staff and roles, SRI electronic billing, and a public website with reservations. I design and build it, with El Encanto, a wine garden in Quito, as customer zero.

The Mantel landing: the floor on a desktop screen and the comanda on a phone, drawn at true scale.
The floor on the screen, the comanda on the phone.

Customer zero

Most places in Ecuador run service on a pile of disconnected tools: WhatsApp groups for the floor, a paper comanda that never quite reaches the kitchen, an Excel sheet filled in by hand to bill against. Together they leak: orders get lost, stock is a number nobody trusts, and the SRI (Ecuador’s mandatory electronic invoicing) is a separate chore. Existing point-of-sale systems rent you a rigid version of the same thing, one account shared with many other venues.

Building against one real venue kept every decision honest: if a feature did not help the host on a Friday night, it did not ship. Mantel is white-label: each venue gets its own instance in its own colour, logo and domain.

The before state on the landing: a WhatsApp group, a paper comanda and an Excel billing sheet.
Before: WhatsApp groups, a paper comanda, the SRI in Excel.

The floor

The first screen is a live map of the room: every table free, seated or reserved, with covers and minutes. The waiter fires the order from the nearest device and it lands on the kitchen and bar displays at once, a paperless KDS. A small print bridge still sends a ticket to stations that want paper.

The brand red carries the voice; a cool teal is kept for the product: table states, live dots, the data.

Inventory runs by store with recipes tied to each dish, so stock drops with the sale and cost and margin per plate are live. Reservations and walk-ins flow onto the floor; eight roles each see only their slice.

The kitchen display in the demo: two tickets, one with a dietary restriction flagged.
The floor in the demo: four active tables, three seated, with covers and minutes on each card.
Cocina, one restriction flagged. Mesas, covers and minutes on each card.
Reservations in the demo: three web bookings to confirm and the count for the night.
Inventory in the demo: plates with their cost, margin and units left.
Reservas to confirm. Inventario, cost and margin per plate.

Billing and the website

In Mantel the SRI is not bolted on. The comanda becomes the invoice: 15% IVA and 10% service figured automatically, and when the table closes the SRI is already filed.

It comes with a public website: a landing, a QR menu that drops a dish the moment the kitchen runs out, and reservations that land on the same floor the host is watching.

The included public site: a reservation form beside the landing, QR menu and reservations tiles.
Landing, QR menu and reservations, on the same system.
Invoices in the demo: eighty authorized by the SRI, a credit note at the top.
Facturas authorized by the SRI, nothing re-keyed.

The brand

White-label theming on the landing: seven brands to pick from and the same floor re-skinned.
Marca blanca. Pick a brand and the whole system changes: the floor, the KDS, the menu, the invoices.
The Mantel mark in ink.The Mantel mark in ink.
The Mantel mark in red.
The mark, and the mark in red.

Where it stands

A React and Tailwind client that installs as a PWA on any phone, tablet or kitchen screen; a Hono API with WebSockets for live order state; Postgres with Drizzle. The pictures on the marketing site are the real components running. In production in Quito, running El Encanto’s service, and in active build toward the next venues.

The app on three phones: the floor, the kitchen, and open checks.
The cash register in the demo: the float, the expected cash and the payments of the shift.
The app on the phones, and the caja at close.