TouchBistro Reviews

I have a higher volume seafood restaurant in Key West Fl called The Stoned Crab. We wanted a system where wait staff could service multiple tables while taking orders with out having to go to a main terminal. After trying another system and seeing others that relied upon cloud support and internet we were left with a crashed system and back to basics. A good resturantuer recommended Touch Bistro, I can tell you things are now amazing, the systems works incredible off its own network(yes you loose internet and never skip a beat) it's fast, reliable and the customer support and tech can't be beat. I really lost faith in entering the market with iPads after a big faluire, but Touch Bistro made me a believer and goes out of there way to find new ways to give us data and programs that we want. To sum it up, if you want to increase service, business, effiency and have happy staff.....You just found the right system, take it from me who found then latter than sooner, you won't regret.
Paul Menta

This is our day-to-day workhorse software to run our retail store and bottle shop at our brewery. Could not live without it. Internet outages make everyone panic now!

I am not one who usually shares my experience when it's bad but I am leaving these reviews in hope that TouchBistro will reach out to me so I can resolve some issues. We purchased the system and went live back in October of 2019 for our new restaurant. The interface looked good but as far as the system being customizable to whatever you want it to do...It's not that. During our time the system lost orders, had issues updating the menu from the cloud to the POS and ultimately cost us around $750.00. The card readers continue to lose connection, the printers print to different locations randomly, and when the POS updated, it messes up because the Main Hub has not updated yet. We have a fairly small location so to attach a screen to our iMac Mini every few days is pretty challenging and if we don't, we start shift with these problems. That is what lead me to look for another POS and we found one that is far exceeding our expectations. Toast has been amazing! I called TouchBistro to cancel and the rep stated that he would send me an e-mail of cancellation and someone would reach back out to me to finish it up. I was on hold for around 1 hour and 20 minutes the first time I tried to cancel. I did get the e-mail but no-one ever called me back to wrap this up. Today I tried to reach out and was waiting on hold for 42 minutes before getting a rep who said he had to transfer me to the care team to get everything done. I was transferred, waited for about 15 minutes on

Worst customer service EVER! Will not recommend solely for that

This is one of the most arrogant company's I've ever encountered. All along they've been treating me like they're doing me a favor and I'm bloody fortunate to pay them every month for a service that has now cost me in the thousands over the purchased hardware and rented software thousands.

Soon as possible, I'm off to another provider -- one that actually answers the phone before I have to shave again.

When I first saw TouchBistro POS sponsoring restaurants on a Gordon Ramsey television show, I thought if he recommended it maybe we needed it as well. I am not at all disappointed by this decision I have made. Traditional tickets are out the door now thanks to this lovely system. You've made our business run smoother, which means more happy customers.

Great app and capabilities, but iOS updates were a huge issue that lead us to find a different POS option.

Sales Tax feature and clock-in clock-out features

Before Touch Bistro we were using the ol' pen and paper system. Tickets would get lost, tabs weren't getting paid and all our employees were charging different prices! We finally grew up! Touch Bistro is not only affordable, I'm sure it actually makes us more money!

After researching the market for new POS system for my newly established Cafe/Bar I found Touch Bistro to be superior to many products in the market. It is cost effective, easy to use, doesn't require specialized equipment (Only Ipad, printer and cash till), easy to install and learn on your own and requires minimum training for new staff. One of the most important feature that many other POS don't provide is the dashboard and cloud reporting. I rely heavily on these data to manage my business effectively and efficiently. It provides a breakdown of sales performance over any period of time, connects to my accounting system and load sales data directly into my accounting system, has excellent integration with 3rd party apps such as 7Shifts for scheduling and Shogo for accounting. I'm truly impressed with this product and it's robustness. I have recommended the product to many other business owners and I always get the same reaction of amazement when they see the reporting it provides compared to the POS systems they currently use.

Over all my experince has been good, I am just very frustrated with support. The tech support is on call all the time, it is the support from other depatments like billing etc. I have have on several occasions left messages for someone to call and have had no response at all, not even a call back or a support ticket to say they have heard my message. I waited up to one week before I called again. I live on the West Coast and support areas are east Coast so at time if I need someone they are gone for the day around 2 pm my time, and no one to help us in the west later in the day as needed. Voice mails don't say when person is available or best times to call or to call between certain times. No mention that other then Tech support the rest are off over weekends, if your catering to restaurant you need more support over weekends, would be nice to only be Mon-Fri as a restaurant owner, but never going to happen. it is all very frustrating and very much a huge hassle to get anyone when needed beyond tech support. I have been very unhappy in this area with Touch Bistro.

Touchbistro is an easy right out-of-the-box solution for all sorts of styles of restaurant service. It's fairly quick to set-up and support is excellent.

You can easily throw new staff to it and have them come out on top feeling like they understand how to use it very quickly. Intuitive as an iPad/iPhone program should be to new users.

Reporting is very good unless you're expecting TouchBistro to do a lot of the heavy lifting - it's good, but not quite amazing on the back end quite yet.

Be aware of how you organize your products early on for the reporting that you do get. It's only as good as the input and thought you put into it while your business is just a baby - that can come back to nip you once you have a better feel for both the software and your establishment.

First off: TouchBistro seems to be the best option out there for a full-service restaurant POS. We looked at everything we could find (that's available in Europe) and trialed the three leaders, and TouchBistro came out on top. We moved from an outdated local POS and have generally been happy. It works as expected, it hasn't had any catastrophic failures, and represents OK value for money.

That said, there are some problems, both with the software and with the sales/support:

- Frequent crashes when printing tickets (more than once per day). You have to restart TouchBistro, find your now-closed table, and reprint the ticket.
- No way to print invoices. This is required in most European countries and TouchBistro offers no way to do this. It causes us a big delay to have to generate one in Word and print it out for the customer. If they are going to sell in Europe they need to have this core function that other, more basic, systems offer.
- No way to print and charge part of a table. Missing is the ability to select various items, regardless of which seat they are at, and let me print a ticket and charge for those items. We literally lose 30 minutes a day moving items between seats for large groups when they want to pay.
- No menu support for multiple locations. Even though they have a page on their web site dedicated to franchises and multiple locations, the capabilities aren't there. Menus have to be painstakingly typed in by hand on the iPad (no cloud/web support) and while you can eventually move a menu from one location to another, it is a convoluted procedure involving a call to tech support. This was one of the selling points that attracted us to TB and they haven't delivered.
- No reporting support for multiple locations. You have to log in, view one report, then log out and log back in with a different username to see the other report.
- The localization (Spanish at least) is horrible. It's like Peggy Hill did it. They seem to have just run all the strings through Google translate and much of it is nonsensical.
- Impossible to update menu during service. If something runs out or a beer tap changes, you have to wait for everyone to log out.

We are going to stick with TB for now, but there is room for improvement.

We embraced touch bistro over 3 yrs ago in that time they have continued to upgrade and make it better and better. That said the only down side is as technology changes so does your need for newer faster iPads and that is something we did not budget for.
I would never go back to a stand alone POS

Just remember that if you make the jump to tableside ordering wirelessly you will be amazed at how much faster your table
Turns are and effective your servers become . Less staff required because they carry the POS with them no lines at a station. Smoother flow in kitchen

Just take .25 per bill
And put it in a gotta get newer IPad fund and you'll be happier then you have ever been

Bill Justus
Owner chef EKs Grill Kelowna BC

Touch Bistro is very easy to use in adding new menu items or editing existing items and also retrieving any multitude of reports available. Pricing is on the lower end of competitive. We are a quick serve restaurant and there are several important features that we can not customize which is why we rate it low on functionality; for instance when we have a credit card transaction we can't turn off the customer's receipt copy and in a QSR most do not want their receipt so we waste a lot of paper. Sales experience to training transition to installation also did not go smoothly for us. Sales is anxious to sell but is not there for you afterwards.

But if we didn't have these, as well as other issues, we'd rate it a very good system. You just have to really know what you need POS to do for you and ask detailed questions and document your answers.

1000% faster then old method

Basically, works okay. This is our first restaurant so our only experience with a POS. For the amount of money this costs, I feel it falls short on the reporting side as it relates to accounting. Changes seem to happen very slowly if at all (only 1 year). Customer services getting better. Whenever I have the need to speak with a live person I've expressed my frustration as well as the issue which initiated the contact. TB prefers emailing their tech support team.

good pricing for a product that meets a small businesses needs

I is more efficient than a regular cash register and allows us to track our sales and tax instead of trying to calculate it after.

you need to be able to authorize users to delete items without granting them void permissions. Also sometimes the POS accepts a tipout amount and passes it to the credit card processor but then forgets that it already processed the tip amount. At that point it refuses to accept any tipout amount and forces us to do an override on the preauthorization, which in turn means manual calculation of total tipout for the server and understates their tip income on wage reporting....