A surge is a timing problem, not a volume problem. Here is what happens to a paid order during one, and the handful of decisions that make those minutes dull.
A venue does not sell its evening evenly. The set ends, the house lights come up, and a large share of the night's orders are placed inside a few minutes. The total is the same number you planned staff and stock around; the shape of it is completely different. Counters that were comfortable early on are three deep the moment an act comes off stage, and the ones nobody thought about are standing empty. Almost everything that goes wrong in those minutes goes wrong because of that shape rather than because of a shortage: the capacity exists somewhere on the site, but it is in the wrong place at the wrong moment and the people holding it cannot see where it is needed.
The first thing to settle is what happens to a paid order that lands in the middle of a surge. It is written down the instant it arrives, before anything is printed anywhere. It then prints at the counter that owes it, at a rate that counter's printer can actually take. A burst does not reach the counter as a burst; it arrives as a stack of tickets in the order the guests paid.
That is what keeps a surge dull. A counter can be behind without being confused, because the paper in front of it is the record of what it still owes and the name on each ticket is the person it belongs to. Nothing rests on somebody remembering who arrived first, and nothing is lost while the counter finishes the order before.
You cannot add a counter during a surge. You can only use the ones you already have better, and most of that work is in how the menu is split across them and what each team has been told to do when it gets busy.
During the surge the useful view is per counter, not for the site as a whole. A site total still looks healthy while one bar carries the night and another has gone quiet. Tickets printing steadily at one counter and not at its neighbour is the signal to move a pair of hands, open the counter you nominated as the overflow, or take the slowest item off the busiest menu for the rest of the night.
A counter that has gone silent is the one thing worth an alarm rather than a glance. If paid orders are stacking up for a station that has stopped printing, somebody with a radio should be told without waiting for a guest to come back and ask. Everything else can be read off the counters themselves: a growing spike of tickets means that counter needs help, and no tickets at all during the busiest minutes of the night means the problem is the counter, not the night.