A kitchen display is only useful when new tickets arrive where the team is looking. In OrderRestro, ticket and table/order changes are pushed through Socket.IO in a room scoped to the restaurant branch. The frontend then invalidates the affected TanStack Query data and fetches the current state.

That last step is the part I like. A socket event can say “this branch’s KDS data changed,” while the query layer remains responsible for loading the canonical view. It avoids maintaining one state model for HTTP responses and a second one for whatever events happen to arrive.

Scope events to the branch

A restaurant system can serve more than one branch. A broadcast that reaches every connected screen is easy to implement and hard to defend. Scoping events to a branch gives the server a smaller audience and makes it easier to reason about who should see each update.

Keep the event small and the source of truth clear

It is tempting to put the entire updated order inside the event.…