Most "best restaurant POS" lists are written for restaurants far larger than yours. They compare enterprise reporting, multi-location management and API access, none of which matter when you have twenty-eight covers and three staff.
Here is what actually separates a good small-restaurant POS from a bad one.
What small means for this decision
Every terminal is a real cost. Per-terminal software pricing is standard in this category and it is brutal at small scale. A system at a modest monthly fee per terminal is a different product at one till than at six.
Nobody is going to administer it. There is no manager whose job is the POS. If configuring the menu takes a week, it will be half-configured forever, and a half-configured menu produces wrong tickets.
Downtime is the whole service. A larger restaurant absorbs a failed terminal. With two, losing one halves you.
The owner is on the floor. The reporting that matters is the kind you can read on a phone between tables, not a dashboard someone studies on Monday.
The five things worth paying for
Fast order entry. This is the one that compounds. Your staff will enter hundreds of orders a night; two extra taps per order is an hour of somebody's evening. Watch a demo of your menu being entered, not the vendor's.
Split checks that actually work. Ask them to split a six-person table by item, with one person paying for two others. It is the most common awkward moment in a small dining room and the quality varies wildly.
Offline service. Ask precisely what happens when the internet drops mid-service. If orders stop, that is a night's takings. Ours keeps taking orders and cash and reconciles afterwards.
Menu changes you can make yourself. Specials change. If a price edit needs a support ticket, the price will be wrong.
Your data, exportable. Sales history and customer records, in a file you can keep.
The three things not worth paying for at your size
Enterprise reporting. Cohort analysis and forecasting modules. You need sales by item, by hour, by server.
Deep inventory. Full recipe-level costing is a real discipline requiring real data entry, and most small kitchens will not sustain it. Counting down key stock is usually as far as it goes usefully.
Multi-location anything. If you get a second site, revisit then.
The cost question, properly
Four lines, and vendors present them differently enough that headline comparison is meaningless.
Software per month — check whether per terminal. Hardware — bought, leased, or bundled, and leases are where these deals get expensive. Payment processing — a percentage plus a per-transaction fee, usually the largest number over a year and the one most often left out of comparisons. Setup and training.
Model all four against your real card volume. A low monthly fee attached to a high processing rate is not a low price, and that combination is common precisely because the monthly fee is what people compare.
We went through the shape of this in what a restaurant POS system costs.
The demo that tells you the truth
Do not watch their demo. Make them watch yours.
Send your actual menu ahead and ask them to enter a real table: four covers, two modifiers, a course sent late, one person paying separately, a tip on card. Ten minutes, and it surfaces nearly everything a feature list hides.
Then ask what happens when the internet drops, and watch whether the answer is specific.
The thing small restaurants forget
The register serves people standing in front of you. It does nothing for the phone.
For a small restaurant that is a bigger gap than it sounds, because your phone rings hardest during service, when every pair of hands is occupied — and most of those calls are reservations. A missed reservation call is a table you did not sell, and no amount of POS reporting will show you that it happened.
Sonorch is both halves in one system, which is our answer to it. The general point holds whatever you buy: decide about the phone at the same time as the register, because buying the register first and discovering the gap later usually means paying twice.
Sonorch POS is ours, priced by team size rather than per terminal, and the pricing page has the tiers.