How Lightspeed Helped Southern Thai Recipes Into 2 Thriving Restaurants
Owner Nail Saengin and Chef Garfield Pachnoi opened Chalong in 2023—a celebration of Southern Thai cuisine inspired by Garfield’s hometown and the food they grew up loving. Chalong quickly became a local favourite, setting the stage for their second venture, Chern, which opened in mid-2025. Running two thriving venues means every part of their operation needs to work seamlessly. From onboarding staff to handling peak service and online orders, efficiency is everything. That’s why Nail and Garfield chose Lightspeed.
Business type:
Restaurant
Customer since:
2023
Location:
Chapel Hill, QLD
Chalong + Lightspeed
With Chalong’s success came new challenges.
Running a busy, high-turnover dining room and managing a growing team required technology that could keep up. Manual processes and slow systems weren’t an option—especially when nightly specials, online orders and table payments all needed to flow seamlessly.
That’s when Chalong turned to Lightspeed.
We sat down with Nail to talk about how Lightspeed helps Chalong deliver fast, effortless service from front to back of house.
At a glance
Lightspeed provides Chalong with an intuitive, all-in-one restaurant platform that combines POS, integrated payments and real-time reporting. With Lightspeed, they can:
- Train and onboard staff quickly with a simple, easy-to-use POS system
- Process fast, accurate payments with automatic splits and no manual entry
- Access daily, monthly and quarterly reports to identify top sellers and improve performance
Support from day one
Opening a restaurant comes with enough moving parts without worrying about the tech. For Nail, having a reliable POS partner from day one made all the difference.
“For me, when we first opened and when we inquired about the software, about information, I would say the very best thing is your support team. They tended to be really supportive and really got to us quickly if we had any questions.”
With instant answers and a team that feels like an extension of the restaurant, Chalong could focus on what mattered most: creating memorable dining experiences for their guests.
Training in minutes
“It helps us a lot with training staff on the POS system because it's really straightforward…”
Training new team members needs to be quick and effective—especially during busy services. Lightspeed’s intuitive interface makes onboarding a piece of cake, giving staff the tools to deliver a smoother, more profitable service.
“Dealing with Lightspeed, it helps us a lot with training staff on the POS system because it's really straightforward, really simple, easy to manage. Also with upselling things or adding items, you can show the availability that you have for the night as well.”
By making it easy to track what’s available and add new items on the fly, the team can focus on guests while boosting revenue through suitable (and delicious) upsells.
Split payments=happy customers
“We stopped worrying about putting any amounts...”
For Chalong, speed and accuracy when it comes to closing the bill is essential, especially during busy dinner services. With Lightspeed Payments fully integrated into their POS, every transaction is quick, seamless and error‑free.
“It’s really fast. There’s no delay and there’s no waiting time. When we press the payment, it automatically comes up on the POS machines and that helps with accuracy. We stopped worrying about putting any amounts in or anything. It was just automatic. That saves the customer time.”
By removing manual entry and reducing wait times, Lightspeed ensures the payment experience is effortless for staff and guests alike.
“Many customers compliment on how they can evenly split (payments), you don't need any calculations or anything. They can just split it in three ways and then it's linked automatically to the EFTPOS machine.”
“Not complicated”
Hospitality moves fast. Chalong knows this and uses the agility afforded by Lightspeed to adapt their offerings on the fly—whether it’s adding a nightly special or updating availability for the evening service.
“Sometimes we have some specials for the night, I can quickly jump online and add the special straight away for the night. It will be less than 5 minutes. Not complicated.”
This ability to move quickly helps the team at Chalong gain the control they need to keep serving food that inspires them which, in turn, keeps their guests happy.
Freedom from spreadsheets
“It makes it really easy and really clear, so we save a lot of time.”
Running two busy venues means Nail and Garfield need clear visibility into what’s working and what isn’t. With Lightspeed’s reporting tools, they can instantly see their top‑selling and most popular items, along with daily, monthly or quarterly performance trends.
“It helps a lot with reports. We like to see things whether the most top‑selling item, or most popular items or the monthly or quarterly report. It makes it really easy and really clear, so we save a lot of time.”
By simplifying reporting and surfacing key insights on-demand, Lightspeed frees the team to focus on growing the business and delivering exceptional service, instead of getting trapped inside a spreadsheet.
Everything connected
“It makes it all flow.”
For busy nights, every second counts—especially when online orders are flowing in alongside dine-in service. With Lightspeed’s seamless Bopple integration, Chalong and Chern can manage online orders without missing a beat.
“(We use) Bopple (for) online orders. It’s already linked to Lightspeed, and it prints automatically to the kitchen, so we don’t need to worry about when an order comes in. Sometimes we get extremely busy. We can change the time to accurately match their online order.”
A final word from Nail
“We also decided to also go with Lightspeed for our second venue (Chern). The support team is amazing.”
- Nail Saengin, Owner, Chalong