SS1WORK
A restaurant that does not exist, with a reservation system that does. It only offers tables that are really free, and a service board that runs the night.
Ember & Salt is a wood-fire restaurant in Windhoek with fourteen tables, dinner six nights a week and lunch on Fridays and Saturdays. It is made up. What it proves is the part of a booking system that is easy to get wrong, which is working out when a table is truly free. A diner picks a party size and a date and sees only the times that are really available, because the system knows table sizes, which tables can be pushed together, and how long each party usually stays. The back office runs a service live, and the menu responds to what the kitchen has tonight. There are four menus (dinner, lunch, the six-course tasting menu and drinks), and a diner can add the tasting menu, with or without wine pairing, to a reservation.
Following one reservation from click to service
The page asks the server for the night. Busy Fridays and quiet Tuesdays are generated from a few rules, plus anything you have booked yourself, so the room already has a believable amount of business in it.
A pure function lays a 15 minute grid over the service, gives each existing booking the tables and time it needs for a party of its size, and keeps only the seatings where a table, or a pair of tables, is free for the whole turn. Times inside the two hour notice window are left out.
The details are checked for size and shape, a hidden field and a minimum time on the form catch simple bots, and each address is limited to a handful of changes every ten minutes.
The best fit is the smallest table that seats the party. It is saved into that night's single document with a check that nothing else changed since it was read, so the table cannot also go to someone else.
A change is tested with your own booking left out, then swapped in as one step, so a move that fails leaves you exactly where you were. A cancellation frees the table straight away.
The back office sees the same document the public site writes to. Marking a no-show frees the table for the rest of its turn, a walk-in takes the best free tables from this minute, and taking a dish off the menu sinks it on the public page at once.
| Part | Status | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Table assignment | Real | Fifteen minute grid, turn times by party size, best fit, joined tables, notice window, last seating and closed dates, all in one tested function. |
| No double booking | Real | Checked by a property test over thousands of random requests, with 40 parallel reservations for the same tables and with two real browsers |
| Change and cancel | Real | A change swaps in one step and never loses the old table if the new one is taken. |
| Service board | Real | Arrived, seated, no-show, walk-ins, the 86 list and specials all change what the public sees. Changes affect your own copy only. |
| Demo clock | Mocked | A private clock so you can see the restaurant in service at any hour. A real restaurant would not have one. |
| Existing bookings | Mocked | Generated from the date, not real people. The names are invented. |
| Menu | Mocked | Invented. No real dishes, suppliers or trademarks. |
| Deposits | Mocked | There is no payment and nothing is ever sent, not even the waiting list or a private dining enquiry. |
Ember & Salt is fictional, so use made-up names and details. What you enter lives in your own private copy of the demo, which no other visitor can see, for up to 24 hours. A nightly job at 02:00 Windhoek time clears it. Nothing is charged, nothing is sent, and the demo clock only changes what you see.
demos/restaurant/src/lib/slots.js The rules that decide which times a table can honestly be offered.demos/restaurant/src/lib/day.js Reserve, change, cancel, no-show and walk-in on one night's document.demos/restaurant/src/lib/seeded.js Existing bookings, generated so every night looks real.packages/demo-kit/src/store.js The store and its atomic update, shared by every demo.The demo clock lets a visitor see the restaurant in service at any hour, but it runs through every rule that cares what time it is. If I did it again I would make time an injected input from the first line, so the clock is a test tool first and a demo feature second.