Salla and Zid earn their spot before you rule them out
Start with the truth: Salla and Zid are good products. The admin is Arabic-first, so the shift manager who runs your Instagram can actually use it without a translator. KNET, Mada, Apple Pay and Tabby are wired in from day one instead of being a two-week integration project. Support answers in Arabic during Kuwait working hours, not at 3am from Toronto. Their paid tiers usually land well under a comparable Shopify plan once you add the apps a real store needs. For a small kitchen selling a fixed set of boxes, that is often enough.
Where they get thin is everything past the basic sale. Gift cards with partial redemption, subscriptions that bill a coffee bag every two weeks, a proper bilingual storefront where the English side is not an afterthought for the Salmiya expat half of your customers, inventory that talks to a POS, and an app store deep enough that whatever you need on a Thursday already exists. Salla and Zid are catching up fast, and on any given feature you should check the current version yourself. But today, the further you get from sell a product and ship it, the more you feel the ceiling.
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The money is in catering, gift cards and orders that skip the aggregator
Run the commission math once and the decision makes itself. Most Kuwait restaurants sign with Talabat or Deliveroo somewhere in the 25–30% of order value range, and on a 12 KD family order that is 3 to 3.6 KD gone before you pay for chicken. A direct order through your own checkout costs you a KNET transaction fee of roughly 100 fils plus whatever your gateway adds on top, so call it 200 to 300 fils all in. Ten direct orders a day at that gap is somewhere around 900 to 1,000 KD a month you were handing to an app.
The bigger prize is the revenue an aggregator never touches. Catering trays for a diwaniya or an office lunch, Ramadan iftar boxes taken as pre-orders three weeks out, Eid gift cards, roasted beans, a branded hoodie, a Friday brunch ticket. All of that is a normal product with a date, a quantity and a deposit, which is exactly what an ecommerce platform was built for. If that is the shape of your growth, Shopify's checkout and gift card system will carry it further than anything else you can set up in a week.
Then there is the customer list. Talabat knows the number of every person who ordered your machboos last month, and you do not. Your own store gives you the phone number, the order history and the consent to send a WhatsApp broadcast the next time you launch a menu. That is what makes Snapchat and Instagram spend pay back twice, once on the order and again on the repeat. A thousand real phone numbers in your own database is worth more than any single campaign you will run this year.
Where Shopify is the wrong tool, plainly
Shopify does not do table reservations, and no app makes it do them well. A booking calendar bolted onto a product page is fine for a twelve-seat tasting menu on a fixed sitting. It falls apart for a forty-table place in Salmiya on a Thursday at 9pm, where you need a floor plan, a waitlist, no-show tracking and a host stand that updates in real time. Buy a reservation system built for that job, or keep taking bookings on WhatsApp like most of Kuwait still does, and keep Shopify out of it entirely.
The second limit is the menu itself. Shopify's product options were designed for size and colour, not for no onion, extra garlic, medium spice, swap the fries for salad, add two sauces. Line-item property apps patch some of it and it still feels bolted on for both the customer and the kitchen. Shopify also has no kitchen display, no driver dispatch and no prep-time throttling for the night forty orders land at 8pm in Ramadan. If hot food out the door is your main business, a restaurant ordering system or your POS vendor's own ordering module will beat it.
So the honest answer for most Kuwait restaurants is a split, not a migration. Hot food stays where the kitchen already works, on your POS ordering module or on the aggregators for reach you cannot buy any other way. Everything with a date and a box goes on Shopify: catering, gift cards, subscriptions, merch, Ramadan pre-orders. Give it one clean domain, one KNET gateway and one link in the Instagram bio. If that side clears 500 KD a month within a quarter, it has earned its own platform. If it does not, you learned something cheap.