Your lunch-special rush and party-tray orders deserve a platform that speaks Chinese takeout. Not a generic checkout page.
Chinese restaurants run on combos, family dinners, high-volume tickets, and a phone that never stops. Zay-OS handles the combo and lunch-special builder, party trays, sauce and spice modifiers, high-volume ticketing, and phone-order deflection — commission-free, with Chinese-language schema indexing. Now onboarding.
Zay-OS is commission-free direct online ordering built for Chinese restaurants and takeout. It ships a combo and lunch-special builder that enforces pick-one logic, party-tray and family-dinner bundles, per-item sauce and spice modifiers, a high-volume kitchen ticket flow with instant 86-an-item control, phone-order deflection via a branded ordering site and QR codes, and Chinese-language schema indexing (中餐外卖在线点餐系统) so Chinese-searching diners find your restaurant.
What a Chinese restaurant actually needs from an ordering platform.
Chinese menus live on combos: pick an entree, a side (fried rice, white rice, lo mein), and an add-on (egg roll, soup, crab rangoon) at a fixed lunch-special price. The builder enforces the combo logic — one entree, one side, price locked to the daily lunch window — so a diner cannot mis-configure it and the kitchen gets a clean, unambiguous ticket every time.
Half-tray and full-tray catering (feeds 8 / 15 / 25) plus family dinners priced for 2, 4, or 6. One-tap reorder for the family that orders the same "Family Dinner B" every Friday. Optional add-ons scale with the tray size — extra rice by the quart, extra sauce, extra utensils and fortune cookies auto-counted to the headcount.
Per-item modifiers for spice level (mild / medium / hot / Thai hot), sauce on the side, no MSG, brown rice swap, protein substitution (chicken / beef / shrimp / tofu / extra-protein upcharge), and steamed-vs-fried. The modifier tree is built for the dishes that carry ten variations, so the diner self-configures and the wok station reads exactly what to fire.
A busy Chinese takeout can push 200+ tickets on a Friday night. The kitchen tablet is built for that throughput — audio alerts, sticky orders, a fast bump flow, and an 86-an-item toggle that greys a sold-out dish across the whole menu instantly so the phone and the site stop taking orders the wok cannot fill.
The phone is the bottleneck at most Chinese restaurants — one person taking orders by hand during the dinner rush while the line rings busy. A branded ordering site with a QR code on every takeout bag and the counter moves repeat callers to self-service, frees the phone for the orders that truly need it, and eliminates the mis-heard-address and wrong-total errors that come with hand-written tickets.
Most Chinese takeout volume is pickup. The storefront defaults to pickup with an accurate ready-time, and the delivery-zone polygon can cap delivery to the radius your own drivers actually cover — with a minimum order and a delivery fee you set — so you are not committing to a cross-town run that loses money.
Lunch-rush pre-orders and dinner scheduling let a diner place a 12:15pm pickup at 11:30am, so the kitchen batches the lunch wave instead of getting slammed all at once. Advance party-tray orders carry a lead-time window you control, so a 25-person tray always has enough notice.
Zay-OS schema carries Chinese alternateName variants (中餐外卖在线点餐系统, 中餐馆在线点餐) so Mandarin- and Cantonese-searching diners find your restaurant in Chinese-language results. The visible storefront stays in English (or your brand language), while the discovery layer reaches Chinese-speaking diners the big platforms under-index.
Every diner who orders direct becomes a row you own — name, phone, order history. The regular who gets General Tso every Thursday gets a one-tap reorder and an occasional "we miss you" text via the built-in CRM, so a takeout customer becomes a repeat channel that costs cents instead of a 25-35% marketplace commission each time.
Combos. High volume. A phone that never stops.
Chinese restaurants are one of the largest independent-restaurant segments in the country, and their operating model does not match the platforms most ordering software was built for. The menu is combo-driven: lunch specials with a fixed price and enforced pick-one logic, family dinners sized for 2, 4, or 6, and party trays for large gatherings. A generic checkout that treats every item as a standalone line mangles that structure — it lets a diner add two entrees to a one-entree combo, or misses the daily lunch-window pricing, and the kitchen inherits the confusion.
The volume is high and heavily weighted toward pickup. A busy takeout can push 200 or more tickets on a Friday night, so the kitchen needs a ticket flow built for throughput — audio alerts, a fast bump, and an 86-an-item toggle that greys a sold-out dish across the phone, the counter, and the site at once, so the wok station is never handed an order it cannot fill. And the phone is the historical bottleneck: one person taking hand-written orders during the dinner rush while the line rings busy, mis-hearing addresses and getting totals wrong. Deflecting repeat callers to a fast branded ordering site is the single biggest operational win most Chinese restaurants can make.
Zay-OS is built around exactly these patterns — the combo and lunch-special builder that enforces the menu logic, party-tray and family-dinner bundles with lead-time control, sauce and spice modifiers for the dishes that carry ten variations, a high-volume kitchen tablet, and phone-order deflection through the branded site plus QR codes on every takeout bag. The Chinese-language schema indexing (中餐外卖在线点餐系统) reaches Mandarin- and Cantonese-searching diners the major platforms under-serve, and the built-in CRM turns the General-Tso-every-Thursday regular into a one-tap reorder that costs cents instead of a 25-35% marketplace commission every single time.
Keep the 25-35% the marketplaces take.
A high-volume Chinese takeout doing meaningful marketplace volume can lose $48,000 or more a year to third-party commissions. Direct ordering keeps that margin: the diner checks out on your own branded site, you keep 100% of the food revenue, and the customer record is yours. Marketplace orders still flow into the same kitchen tablet via Otter, so the wok station works one queue. The platform is live at Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach today; every other restaurant is now onboarding.
$499/month. Combo builder included.
Operator is $499/month per location. Operator + Marketplace (Otter-ingested DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) is $599. Concierge is $699/month per location. The diner pays a small flat service fee ($0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery) — party-tray catering is billed at 10% — and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue.
Full pricing breakdown →Asked by Chinese-restaurant owners.
What makes online ordering for Chinese restaurants different?
Can Zay-OS handle combo meals and lunch specials?
How does Zay-OS reduce phone orders?
Does the platform handle party trays and catering for large orders?
Can diners customize spice level, sauce, and protein?
How much does Zay-OS cost for a Chinese restaurant?
Can I keep DoorDash and Uber Eats while running direct ordering?
Built for Chinese takeout. Now onboarding.
Run the free grader to see what your Chinese restaurant lost to the marketplaces last month — or jump straight to getting started.