Wirtschaft zur Burg: six-course menus at the table and a little Beizli that runs itself

Meilen, above Lake Zurich. People have been eating and drinking at the Burg for more than 150 years, and today Sascia Held and Cham Günter carry that history forward. Their cooking is regional, seasonal and made in house from start to finish: from the Schruubebrot and the black barley grissini to the Truubebrand distilled from the restaurant’s own vines. Fish and crayfish come from the Grieser fishery in Obermeilen, vegetables and herbs from Slow Grow in Mönchaltorf. The menu follows the year, not the other way round.

An offer like this is a joy for guests and a real test for any POS system. This story shows how the Burg handles it simply with JamWaiter, and why over the summer it even ran a small Beizli without any staff.

Sascia Held and Cham Günter run Wirtschaft zur Burg in Meilen.

A demanding offer

The Burg does not simply have a menu of starters and mains. It offers menus with three to six courses, for the evening and for occasions such as birthdays, weddings or company dinners. On top of that come vegan, gluten-free and lactose-free options, a children’s menu, aperitifs in three sizes and special requests that differ from one party to the next.

For the service team this means that a table does not order five dishes, it orders one menu with choices in individual courses. The kitchen needs to know which course comes next at which table and which guest gets which option. And at the end, the bill still has to be clear and correct.

The six-course principle, one to one in JamWaiter

In JamWaiter, a multi-course menu is built exactly the way the Burg serves it: as a menu with its courses and one menu price. Each course is either required or optional, and where the guest may choose, the choice sits right inside the course. The options the Burg’s guests ask for find their place in the relevant course instead of appearing as loose extra items on the bill.

In service, operation stays simple. At the table the team picks the menu, taps through the courses and enters the guest’s choice there. The order goes straight to the kitchen, and the bill shows the menu just as it appears on the menu card. New creations, and the Burg comes up with them all the time, are quickly added in OrderAdmin and assigned to a course.

Something new is created in the Burg’s kitchen every day. The order still has to arrive clearly.

So every requirement of the house has its clean place in the system: menus with changing courses, options for guests with special requests and evenings with large parties. The team does not have to learn a second tool or keep handwritten notes.

In summer: a Beizli without staff

On sunny days, lots of walkers pass by the Burg. Many of them do not stop for a full menu, but would happily have a drink, a snack or an ice cream.

For these guests, the Burg set up a small self-service Beizli with JamOrder over the summer: «s’Beizli». A sign on the red barn explains how it works in four steps:

1. Scan the QR code with your phone camera.
2. Choose a product and pay.
3. Take your drink, snack or ice cream.
4. Enjoy it in the garden or take it with you.

The sign on the barn: scan, pay, take. We have blurred the QR code for this story.

Guests pay on their phone before they take anything. There is no till, no cash box and nobody standing next to it. Every sale is in the system right away, with the same products and in the same end-of-day report as the restaurant. For the Burg, the Beizli is therefore not a second business with its own bookkeeping but simply one more point of sale.

“In summer, lots of walkers pass by. With the Beizli they serve themselves, even when none of us has a moment, and in the evening every sale is neatly in the end-of-day report.”

Sascia Held, host, Wirtschaft zur Burg

Walkers sit down in the little garden next to the barn.

The note «do not scan with TWINT» on the sign is a good practical tip, by the way: the QR code opens the JamOrder ordering page in the browser. The phone’s camera app takes you straight there, and payment then happens in JamOrder, with TWINT too if you like.

What other businesses can take away

Wirtschaft zur Burg shows that an upscale offer and a simple system are not a contradiction:

• Run multi-course menus as menus, with courses, choices and a menu price, instead of as a list of single items.
• Store options where they belong, in the relevant course, so that service and kitchen never have to guess.
• Extra revenue without extra staff through a self-service offer via QR code that is settled in the same system as the restaurant.

More about the Burg, its house specialities and its events is on wirtschaftzurburg.ch (in German). The website was designed by Jamatu, by the way.

Do you run a restaurant with a demanding menu yourself, or want to set up a takeaway offer without extra staff? The page Restaurant shows how JamWaiter and JamOrder work together, and Takeaway tells you more about self-ordering via QR code.