A lot of POS and restaurant-tech vendors treat Iraq as one market and build one product for all of it. Baghdad and Erbil are different enough — in scale, in payment habits, in the competitive landscape — that it's worth being specific about what actually changes.
Scale changes the calculation
Baghdad's restaurant and café scene is simply larger and denser than Erbil's — more venues, more competition for the same customer, and a faster pace of new openings. That means the bar for 'looks professional and modern' is higher, and a restaurant running on paper menus or verbal order-taking stands out more as behind the curve than it would in a smaller market.
Multi-language needs shift
Erbil's customer base leans more heavily on Kurdish alongside Arabic and English. Baghdad's is overwhelmingly Arabic-first, with English for a smaller international and business-traveler segment. A menu system that treats all four languages (English, Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish) as equally necessary everywhere is solving a problem Baghdad venues don't fully have — though having Kurdish available costs nothing extra and doesn't hurt.
What doesn't change
The core problems are identical: verbal orders get mis-relayed to the kitchen, cash counting at close is still manual and error-prone almost everywhere, and a printed menu goes stale the moment a price changes. Baghdad restaurants have exactly the same gap between what paper-based ordering costs in staff time and mistakes, and what a QR + kitchen-ticket system actually saves.
What a Baghdad venue should actually ask a vendor
- Does setup happen in person, or is this a self-service signup with no local support?
- Is pricing in IQD, and is it a flat number or a quote that depends on the conversation?
- Does the system assume cash is the exception rather than the default?
TU2 started in Erbil and is expanding across Iraq with the same model: free in-person setup, QR ordering, waiter POS, kitchen tickets, and cash-first design, IQD pricing from 15,000/month. The product doesn't change city to city — the market it's selling into does, and that's worth knowing going in.