Notes from the line

Built behind the line.

Why I made Ghee, from someone who has worked every station in his own restaurant.

Last updated October 9, 2026

I didn’t come to this from software. I came to it from the line.

At Remedy House I’ve done every job there is. Line, prep, dish, barista, front of house. I’ve been the one running down to the basement mid-rush because we’re out of something, and the one logging an order at the end of the night with my apron still on. When you own a small place you’re never one person. You’re whoever the shift needs.

Our kitchen is tiny. The menu has twelve items, and the prep list for those twelve items has about eighty mise. Each one has a par, a shelf life and someone who’s supposed to check it. Then add inventory across more than one location, deliveries showing up whenever they show up, and three people asking you three different questions while there’s a line out the door.

For a long time there was no system. There was me.

The spreadsheets

So I did what a lot of owners do. I built spreadsheets. Prep sheets, order guides, inventory counts. To be honest, they were mostly there to calm my own brain down. If it was written somewhere, I didn’t have to hold it all in my head.

They helped, but a spreadsheet trusts whoever’s typing into it. There were no checks and no accountability. Someone fills a cell in wrong, or skips a row, or types a 10 where a 1 belongs, and the whole thing quietly breaks. You don’t find out until you’re short on something you were sure you had.

The laminated sheets on the wall had the opposite problem. They work great for the shift, and then they get wiped clean every day. Whatever happened yesterday is gone. There’s no log and nothing to look back at.

The BLT summer

The moment it really clicked for me was a busy summer. Tomato prices doubled. We were selling a ton of BLTs, and it felt like a great month.

It wasn’t. When I finally sat down and ran it, we were losing money on every BLT that went out the window. The price of tomatoes had moved, and on top of that, the bacon portion on the laminate on the line didn’t match the portion in my costing spreadsheet. Two sheets, two answers, and nothing connecting them. By the time I caught it, the summer was mostly over.

Nobody did anything wrong. The information just lived in places that never talked to each other.

Why I built it myself

I tried the apps. I tried the big back-office platforms, the database tools, the inventory apps, the scheduling apps. Some of them are good at the one thing they do. But none of them worked together, and in a restaurant everything touches everything. What you order depends on what you counted. What you prep depends on what you sold. What a plate costs depends on what you paid for the tomatoes this week, and on what portion the cook is actually using.

It has to be a circle. Every piece feeds the next one, and what happens on the line comes back around and makes tomorrow’s list smarter. That feedback loop was the thing I couldn’t buy, so I built it.

That’s Ghee.

What it’s like for the team

I built it for the people actually doing the work, not for the office. Every task takes somewhere between ten seconds and three minutes. Count this. Prep that. Log the delivery. Use the tomatoes before they turn. The training is built right into the tasks, so a new hire learns how we do things by doing them.

The part I didn’t expect was how the team reacted. My staff call it fun. My assistant manager’s word for it was “smart.” Nobody has ever said that about a spreadsheet.

Who I’m looking for

I’m opening Ghee up to a small group of founding restaurants, and I know exactly who it’s for. It’s an owner or a chef who looks at all that chaos (the line out the door, the delivery to log, three people asking three questions, the tomatoes about to go bad) and thinks this could be simpler.

It can be. Ghee turns all of it into a simple daily task list your team is actually happy to work through, and every finished task feeds the next day’s list.

Establish the basics first. Once those are solid, you can start to build anything you want.

If that sounds like your kitchen, I’d like to talk. Apply to be a founding restaurant, or write to me at hello@gheemgmt.com.

Brent, owner of Remedy House and founder of Ghee