Bridge Road Brewers: One recipe system, two kitchens, 350km apart

Bridge Road Brewers has been pouring beer and firing pizzas out of a wood oven in Beechworth, in Victoria's High Country, for close to two decades. It's a high-volume kitchen in a regional setting — 350km from Melbourne, with a menu built around wood-fired pizza, shared plates and a brewery crowd that turns up in the hundreds on a busy weekend.

When Bridge Road brought a second kitchen under the same banner in Brunswick, Executive Chef Ludovic Baulacky needed both sites cooking, costing and training from the same playbook — without doubling the admin or losing sight of where the margin was actually going.

Opsi by GoTab now sits underneath both kitchens, connecting recipe costing, supplier invoices and point-of-sale data into one place that the whole team — not just the chef — can see.

At a glance

2 kitchens running one shared recipe and costing system
350km between Beechworth and Melbourne, with freight built into every recipe
16 pizzas per batch through the Beechworth wood oven
600+ covers served over Easter with no stock outages
5–6% wastage allowance now planned into prep for peak trade
1 costing system every stakeholder can log into — GM, accountant and kitchen
Real-time food cost % visible at all times, instead of waiting until stocktake to know where margin stands
38 hours saved per month on admin tasks like manual price updates, invoice entry and recipe costing

A costing system only one person could see

Before Opsi by GoTab, Bridge Road's food costing lived in a personal software license Ludo had used at a previous job in London. It worked, but it was licensed to him alone — the general manager and the accountant had no way to log in and see it.

Day to day, the bigger problem was simpler: there was no way to see spend per head as it happened. Sales and purchasing sat in separate systems that never talked to each other, so understanding whether the kitchen was tracking well on a given day meant piecing it together after the fact rather than seeing it live.

The margin that disappears one tablespoon at a time

Ludo's biggest lesson on food cost didn't come from a course — it came from a book on the principle of "what gets measured, gets managed." In a regional kitchen, a recipe that calls for one tablespoon of vanilla seeds but gets two doesn't look like much in the moment. It can still turn a dish that should cost a dollar into one that costs two.

The same logic applies at scale. A batch of an ingredient that should last a week and runs out five kilos early is a costing problem before it's anything else — and without a shared system, there was no easy way to see where it went.

"The money is on your knife. If you're going to portion a porterhouse, that porterhouse has to come out right every time — a portion that's too big or too small both cost you money."

Ludovic Baulacky, Executive Chef, Bridge Road Brewers

One recipe database, two kitchens

With Opsi by GoTab in place, every recipe — and its true cost — is built once and shared across Beechworth and Brunswick. A dish like the venues' Porco Russo pizza uses the same recipe, the same sauce and the same method on both sides, so the plate a guest gets in Beechworth matches the one served in Brunswick.

Recipe cards carry cost per ingredient and per portion, and update automatically as invoices sync in — which matters more in a location 350km from the city, where every delivery carries a freight surcharge that used to need re-entering by hand. That single change removed a recurring admin task and kept pricing accurate without anyone needing to update it every other day.

Because GoTab's point-of-sale data feeds directly into Opsi by GoTab, Ludo can compare what was sold against what was actually purchased for the same period — visibility that didn't exist with the old, disconnected setup. It's also given the kitchen a stronger position at the negotiating table: buying volumes across both venues are pooled to negotiate pricing with shared suppliers, with margins in Opsi by GoTab staying protected even when a deal brings the cost price down.

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From the "dream crusher" to a quiet pass

Bridge Road's kitchens have moved from paper dockets — printed, clipped and stacking up two metres wide on a busy night — to kitchen display screens. Ludo calls the old printer the "dream crusher": the constant mechanical noise of tickets landing was, in his words, exactly what it sounds like during a big service.

On screen, each order moves from green to amber at five minutes and red at fifteen, giving the kitchen a live read on how it's tracking without needing to hear it. Guest-facing wait times are now pushed straight to the QR code at checkout — automatically extending during known peak periods like Easter — so front-of-house no longer has to walk table to table explaining delays.

Orders also batch together on screen: fifty of the same pizza fire as one ticket rather than fifty separate ones, so a full table goes out together instead of trickling out one plate at a time.

Built-in wastage, not surprise wastage

Knowing what a busy night looks like in advance now shapes how Bridge Road preps for it. Ahead of a night expecting 300–400 covers, the kitchen plans in a 5–6% buffer on high-volume ingredients like pepperoni — accounting for the extra piece or two that inevitably lands on a pizza mid-rush — rather than treating it as unplanned loss discovered after the fact.

It's a shift from reacting to wastage to budgeting for it, and it means the numbers in Opsi by GoTab still hold up even on the busiest service of the month.

Training that travels between kitchens

Recipe cards in Opsi by GoTab carry photos as well as costs, and are accessible from staff phones, shared computers and the kitchen display screens themselves — available to the whole team, any time, rather than living in one chef's head or a folder in the office.

That's proven especially useful onboarding junior staff and levelling out language and experience gaps across an international kitchen team, and it feeds directly into performance reviews: Ludo can see exactly where a team member's training sits and what to focus on next, rather than starting each review from scratch.

Tested on the busiest weekend of the year

Bridge Road's Beechworth kitchen served roughly 600 covers over an Easter long weekend without a single stock outage — a genuine stress test for a regional venue where a missed supplier run isn't easily fixed same-day. On one occasion, a delivery mix-up meant a cheese order destined for Beechworth was dropped in Brunswick instead; the team drove it across in time for service, but the near-miss reinforced why visibility over stock levels, live sales and purchasing now sits in one shared system rather than several disconnected ones.

"If diners knew what really happened behind the pass, they'd see frantic teamwork and a lot of small sacrifices that go into making sure everyone gets fed — weekends, public holidays, all of it."