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Coursing (hold & fire)

Coursing lets the kitchen pace a meal instead of firing everything at once. Starters cook straight away; mains wait until someone decides the table is ready for them and fires the course. It’s how a table gets its main a few minutes after the starter plates are cleared, not on top of them.

The Grill on a coursed order. The mains sit greyed and Held; the starters cook now. Use the bottom switcher to see other stations.

On a coursed order, each course has its own heading (Starters, Mains, Dessert). A held course is greyed out and tagged Held, with its items inert — nothing to cook yet. A live course looks and works like any normal ticket.

The ticket’s bump button reflects this too. If the only work left is on a held course, it reads Held — fire to start (or Held — fire to continue) and won’t bump — because there’s genuinely nothing to send yet.

When the table’s ready for the next course, fire it:

  • Tap the Fire button on the course heading, or
  • press F (fires the next held course on the focused ticket).

The course goes live on every screen at once — the grill, the fry station, the pass — so wherever those items are cooked, they light up together. Firing is usually the pass or a caller’s job, but any screen showing the course can do it.

Fired the mains before the table was ready? Put the course back on hold:

  • Tap Recall on the course heading, or
  • press Backspace (un-fires the course you most recently fired).

It goes back to Held everywhere, exactly as before.

Whether a course starts held or auto-fires is a property of the course itself, set once per course in the admin portal. That keeps every screen in the site consistent — a course can’t be held on one screen and cooking on another.

Your KDS Settings → Course firing shows the current policy (each course tagged Held or Auto-fire), but it’s read-only here — change it in the admin portal.

Coursing and flows work together: on a flow, each course travels the line on its own. The starters can be crossing the grill and reaching the pass while the mains are still held back at the start — then you fire the mains and they begin their own journey down the line. The pass can fire the next course right from its docket. See Flows & the pass.