Five decisions
before the menu.
Kaveh — you wrote those two words at the top of your sheet. They are the best thing on it. This page is about making sure the café you build can actually keep that promise.
Read it in order. There are five decisions, a few things for you to judge yourself, and — at any moment — you can open the panel on the right and argue with it. It will argue back, and it knows everything Kian and I discussed. Push it hard.
Two true things that pull against each other.
You said: not fast food. Food that nourishes. Simple ingredients, sourced close, prepared fresh, nothing hidden, nothing preserved. Eaten in peace.
We also decided: The Lōr is a place you pick food up from. Easy pickup. Curbside. A window. People come, they take good food, they go.
Those two sentences describe opposite kitchens. One is slow and considered. The other is a queue. If we don't decide this now, on purpose, it will decide itself — badly. Food that takes eleven minutes to cook. A line that doesn't move. A box that arrives soggy. A cook who can't be trained in a week.
Ready food.
Cooked slowly, with care, in the morning. Served in sixty seconds.
The care goes into the sourcing and the cooking — not into plating each dish to order while someone waits at a window. You keep every word of your promise. The customer gets it handed over fast.
Because of what happens at 12:40 on a Tuesday.
A café doing pickup at lunch does most of its business in about ninety minutes. If a dish takes eight minutes to cook to order, one cook can produce roughly eleven of them in that window. Eleven. That is not a business — that is a rent bill.
If the same dish is cooked in the morning and portioned at the window, the same cook can serve sixty, eighty, a hundred. The food is not worse. It is often better — a stew is better after two hours than it is after twenty minutes, and you already know this.
The constraint isn't the cooking. It's the clock at the counter, and the wage you're paying while the queue waits.
And here is the part that matters.
This is not a compromise of your vision. It is your vision.
Lōr food is mountain food. Zagros food. It was always cooked in one pot, in the morning, over a slow fire — and eaten when people came in from the day. Stews. Soups. Kuku. Braised meat. Grains and legumes. Bread and preserved fruit. None of it has ever been plated to order. It was made with patience and then it was ready.
The heritage you're drawing from already solved the operational problem you have. You just have to trust it.
Every dish you serve will spend twelve minutes in a box.
This is the thing that is easy to forget when you cook. You will never see it happen. You hand the box over the counter — it's perfect, it's beautiful — and then it sits in a car, on a passenger seat, on a desk. Twelve minutes.i
So: put it in a box. Leave it twelve minutes. Open it.
No sog. No wilt. No leak. No separation. No sad.
Judge each dish yourself first. Then see.
Look at what survives. Stews. Soups. Kuku. Grain and legume bowls. Slow-braised meat. Wraps in your own flatbread. Every single thing on that list is Lōr food. The box doesn't fight your heritage. It fights the Canadian diner breakfast you sketched next to it.
Bread is the enemy of the box. A sandwich is the default answer to lunch and it is the worst possible pickup item — twelve minutes and the bread has drunk everything inside it. If sandwiches stay, they need sturdy bread, dry-side fillings, and anything wet in a separate cup. A wrap in taftoon or lavash survives far better — and it's more yours anyway.
One queue. One menu. One price. Four ways in.
You want to accommodate everyone. That instinct is right — but it cannot mean building four different systems. It means one system, with four doors into it. One kitchen. One menu. Same price whether you walk up or order ahead.
1 · The window counter — the main way. It's in your own drawing. No technology. Works on day one. It's also the only channel where you keep every dollar.i
2 · Order ahead — you sketched a QR code and an ordering app. You already have this: Square gives you an online ordering page for free. Put the QR on the window, on the cup, on the table. Do not build a custom app. It would cost thousands and weeks you don't have, and it would do less.
3 · Curbside — same system. Square already does it: the customer taps "I'm here," you get a ping. You need two marked stalls and a sign. That's all.
4 · Phone — people will call. Take the order. Don't advertise it. It's the slowest channel and it ties up a person who should be at the window.
And the platform seats — they exist, people may sit. But no table service, no bussing, no wifi password on the wall. Order at the window, sit if you like. This is not a place people bring a laptop and stay three hours. That was a decision, and it was the right one.
Because of what an app actually is, after you've built it.
The build is the cheap part. Then it needs hosting, payment compliance, a menu that stays in sync with Square, updates every time Apple changes something, and a person to fix it at 7am when it breaks on a Tuesday. And every customer has to be persuaded to install it — for a café they've been to once.
Square's ordering page opens instantly from a QR code. No install. It's already connected to your till, so the menu can't fall out of sync. It handles the payment and the tax. And it costs nothing.
Build the app in year two, when you have a thousand regulars who want it. Not three weeks before you open, when the kitchen isn't finished.
Every dish is a promise you have to keep, every day, forever.
Not just a recipe. A dish is: a supplier you have to call. Stock that spoils if it doesn't sell. A step at 6am. A thing to train a new cook on. A button in Square. An allergen sheet. A cost you have to know.
And on the other side of the counter, a dish is a decision you're asking a stranger to make in fifteen secondsi, standing at a window, possibly in the cold.
Move the slider. Watch what it does to your kitchen and to your customer.
Notice that "choice for the guest" peaks and then falls. That's not a trick of the graph. Past about nine dishes in a section, people stop deciding and default to coffee.
A small menu that sells out is a story people tell. A big menu with gaps is just a café that ran out of things.
But you want to cook many things. So here is the answer.
A chalkboard by the window. One dish. One day. Whatever you want. Whatever was good at the market that morning. Whatever your mother made. When it's gone, it's gone.
This is not a consolation prize. It is the best thing on the menu.
It lets you cook something different every single day, forever — at almost no cost to the kitchen, because it's one batch, no permanent supplier, no permanent training. It gives people a reason to come back tomorrow. It uses up beautiful surplus instead of binning it. And it is the audition stage: a dish that sells out on the board three weeks running has earned a place on the fixed menu — and something else gets cut to make room for it.
The fixed menu isn't a cage. It's the frame that makes the board mean something. If everything is special, nothing is.
Who is standing outside your window at 7:40 in the morning?
Your notes are full of breakfast. Three signature breakfasts. A whole philosophy of the egg. Morning Glory. The Third Meal. Kooku. It's the most loved part of the sheet, and you can feel it.
Now be honest about the room.
You open at seven. You have decided — correctly — that this is not a place where people sit with a laptop for two hours. So nobody is sitting. Which means breakfast is entirely a person on their way to work, who will not get out of their car for long, and who has a drive-thru on the way that is faster and cheaper than you will ever be.
Not the menu. Not the branding. Three hours a day of paid staff, lights, and heat, serving a room that may be empty.i Six days a week. That is the number that quietly kills cafés.
There is exactly one way to win it: one breakfast item worth a detour. Handheld. Under eleven dollars. Out the window in sixty seconds. And impossible to get anywhere else in Calgary — because if it's a bacon-and-egg sandwich, you have already lost to the drive-thru.
A kuku, hot, folded into your own bread. Something nobody else in this city is handing out of a window at 7:15 in the morning.
If we can't invent that item, the honest move is to open at ten — and put those three hours of labour into a lunch that's twice as good. That is not defeat. That is choosing where to be excellent.
Price for the food you actually intend to make.
This is the shortest section and the one people get wrong.
You promised: fresh, local, made that morning, no preservatives. That food cannot be sold for twelve dollars.i Not in Calgary, not in 2026, not with rent and a wage. If you price at twelve, one of two things happens — and both happen quietly, around month four.
Either you start buying cheaper. Frozen instead of fresh. Further away instead of local. A little something to make it keep. You break the promise, one small honest-seeming decision at a time.
Or you don't — and you lose money on every plate until you close.
Fifteen to seventeen dollars for a lunch main. Above a sandwich shop, below a restaurant. It's what the food costs to make properly, plus a margin that lets you stay open. Breakfast handheld 8–11. Soup 8 a cup, 12 a bowl. Sweets 4–6.
And one more thing: put one dish at twenty-four dollars. The Kooku platter — for two, with the bread and the dates and the sweets, exactly as you described it. Almost nobody will order it. That is fine. That is not its job.
Nobody knows what a bowl of stew is worth. There is no reference price in anyone's head. So people don't judge your price against the market — they judge it against the other things on your menu.
Put a $24 platter at the top and $16 stops being "expensive." It becomes the sensible, moderate, reasonable choice. Take the platter away and that same $16 sits alone at the top, and it becomes the most expensive thing you sell.
Same dish. Same price. Different meaning. That is the whole trick, and it is not a dishonest one — the platter is real, it's beautiful, and the few people who order it will remember it.
It also tells anyone reading the board that there is a real kitchen back there, run by someone who knows what a platter is. And it's the seed of your catering business.
This is what you just decided.
Send it to Kian. He'll see your five answers, anything you add below, and the whole conversation you had on the way down. The menu gets built from exactly this.
Anything else he should know?
Dishes you refuse to give up. Suppliers you already have. Something about the street we've got wrong. Write it here.
One last thing: we've assumed 42 Ave SE means trades, light industry, small business — people who want food that is hot, substantial, fast, with somewhere to park. Not a brunch crowd. If that's wrong, several things above change. You know that street better than anyone. Tell us in the box.