How to 86 a dish
To 86 a dish is restaurant shorthand for marking it sold out. It is the signature control in CounterFire: one tap pulls the dish off your customer ordering portal within a few seconds, so nobody can order something you cannot make.
86 a dish
From the console menu editor or the product list:
- Find the product.
- Toggle it sold out.
That is the whole action. The change is immediate and reversible.
What happens next:
- The product is flagged sold out in your data.
- The cached public menu is invalidated right away, so the next customer load no longer offers the dish.
- The dish disappears from the customer ordering portal within a few seconds.
When you have the dish again, toggle sold out off. It returns to the portal just as quickly.
86 versus hide
These are two different toggles and they exist for two different reasons.
| Toggle | Meaning | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Sold out (86) | Temporarily unavailable. The signature fast toggle. | You ran out of an ingredient for the shift and will have it again soon. |
| Hidden | Not published at all. | The dish is off the menu, seasonal, or not ready to sell yet. |
Both remove the dish from what customers can order. Reach for sold out for the in-service “we are out of this right now” case, because it is built to be flipped quickly and flipped back. Use hidden for longer-lived menu changes.
Modifier options can also be sold out
The same idea applies one level down. An individual modifier option, for example Guacamole in an Extras group, can be marked sold out on its own. The dish stays orderable, but that one add-on is no longer selectable. This lets you 86 a topping without 86ing the whole dish.
Why it is fast
Speed here is a product promise, not an accident. The public menu is served from a cache for sub-second customer loads. The moment you 86 a dish, that cache is invalidated as part of the same change, so there is no stale window where a customer can still add a sold-out item. The platform targets this 86-to-portal update at a few seconds and that budget is measured in the automated test suite. See latency budgets for the numbers.