Served Before

Served Before is an offline-first dinner hosting history book for home hosts who plan one named dinner at a time. Open to a fullscreen table-plates board, seat your guests, build the courses, and catch repeat dishes before you cook—so every night feels considered, not recycled. THE TABLE BOARD Start on a top-down place-setting view for the active dinner. Arrange 2–12 guest seat cards around a shared course rail. Each plate shows guest name, dietary tags, known dislikes, and last-served highlights. Drag to reseat anyone in seconds and keep the whole night visible at a glance. COURSE RAIL EDITOR Add ordered chips for drinks, starter, main, side, and dessert. Give each dish a name and cuisine tags, then mark which ones earned seconds after the meal. The board stays focused on tonight’s table—no sprawling recipe database required. REPEAT-SERVE WARNINGS Before you lock the menu, Served Before scans past dinners for overlapping guest-and-dish pairs. Amber banners appear on offending plates when a dish, or a near match, was already served to someone seated. Spot collisions on the table before you shop or cook. PER-GUEST PREFERENCE CARDS Dietary needs, hard dislikes, loved dishes, and notes live on each guest’s card. Edit from any seat; cards persist across all dinners offline so the next invite never repeats a flop or ignores an allergy. ARCHIVE, MEMORY, CHECKLIST, EXPORT Browse a dated timeline of past nights with guest roster thumbnails, course summaries, and which dishes earned seconds. Search a dish memory index of everything you’ve plated, with serve counts and average seconds rate. Build a pre-dinner checklist from the active course rail, seat people quickly from your guest roster library, and copy a plain-text dinner summary (date, guests, courses, seconds) to the clipboard for sharing outside the app. A sample Friday Pasta Night—six seated guests, three courses, two drink options, and one intentional collision—is included so you can try the warning flow on first launch. Core loop: seat guests → build courses → flag seconds → archive the night. Keep every guest’s tastes in one place-setting book, fully offline.