A 10-unit wine-bar group knew first-drink service felt slow, but couldn't prove it. Bartenders bumped the KDS when they had a second, not when the drink landed, and guest counts defaulted to “1” — so every report was fiction.
TableIQ measured Time to First Drink directly from the cameras already in each room: guest seated to first drink delivered, with nothing for a bartender to touch. No new hardware, no manual entry.
Across five rooms in a single night it surfaced 114 breaches of the 7-minute target and named the worst room — 9 minutes average. The operator fixed one bar instead of guessing across ten.
How we measured it
Time to First Drink = guest seated to first drink delivered, read entirely from existing CCTV by a vision-language model. No POS, no KDS, nothing for a bartender to enter.