Hey Paul,
Iain here,
Your suspicions are correct. I have helped a few bars/ restaurants/ cafes in my days and it can be really hard to get Shopify POS to play nicely with some of the workflows that are normal in food/ drink service.
There are some situations where it can be “worth” it to go with Shopify POS as well - if you are using Shopify Plus for online sales the POS Pro subscription is free making it a great deal and balancing some of the costs of the apps needed to run the operation.
I will also be honest I am not sure there is a perfect system out there to account for the inventory for drinks to bottles i.e 12 drinks that use x,y,z shots = a,b,c volumes taken from the stock. What I have recommend to merchants in the past is to split your inventory in a way so you manually take bottle stock for the drinks stock and keep a record of those sales - one workaround is to create a customer in Shopify called Bar Stock and then “sell” that customer a full bottle at 100% off to be able to account for stock moving from main stock to being used at the bar level.
That is the tip of the iceberg - the harder ones are workaround for Tabs, Tables, Reservations, drink/ food modifiers. Not that it cant be done but I would also say there is POS platforms much better suited to food service. I have seen folks use Square and then an app like SKU IQ (here) to link some of the details in the back end to make operations a bit smoother.
Let me know if you have any questions and I am happy to share some more advice on using Shopify in ways it wasn’t explicitly designed for.