The complete restaurant glossary for 2022

Restaurant professionals are expected to know & remember a lot of things. From food prep instructions, to table numbers, to kitchen lingo, to restaurant delivery & online ordering terms. As your partner in all things delivery, the team at Otter has curated a glossary of every delivery-related term restaurateurs need to know in 2022. This glossary is easy to understand, and designed to be printed & shared, so you can ensure your team is up-to-date on all the relevant delivery lingo and train new team members with ease.

In this guide, well cover all the terms you need to know in regards to orders, your kitchen, restaurant operations, restaurant logistics, restaurant finance, and restaurant innovation. We made sure to keep the definitions short & sweet so you feel comfortable using the terms in your everyday life moving forward.

We've broken the terms into 6 key categories:

1. Orders
2. Kitchen
3. Operations
4. Logistics
5. Finance
6. Innovation

Orders related restaurant terminology

• Online order management system: An all in one solution that consolidates all of your digital orders from third party apps like DoorDash + your restaurant's direct ordering platform into a single tablet to make managing delivery simpler.
• Order issues: An order issue occurs when there is a missing or incorrect item in a customer’s order, when their order arrives cold, damaged, or late: essentially, when a customer clicks “help” on their delivery app of choice to submit a complaint, it is likely due to an order issue.
• Order aggregation: Think of order aggregation as the action that an online order management system owns. Order aggregation, or consolidation, is the act of having all your orders in a single place.

Kitchen specific restaurant terminology

• Holding: Holding is the temperature and time requirements for specific item. It’s critical for your team to know the proper temperature to hold a particular menu item to ensure that the food you prepare is safe for your customers to eat.
• Mise en place: “To put in place or gather” in French, mise en place refers to the act of getting your ingredients, pans, tools ready before the food preparation begins.
• Inventory: The literal definition of inventory refers to anything within your restaurant that costs the business money, but when restaurateurs refer to inventory, they are generally referring to the ingredients coming in and going out of your kitchen.
• Shelf life: The length of time for which a particular ingredient or item remains usable. When the shelf life is up, an ingredient is effectively expired.

Restaurant terminology related to operations

• POS: Point of Sale refers to the time and place - or the point - that a sales transaction is completed. A restaurant POS system is the software and hardware that restaurants use to run their entire business.
• Counter service: A counter service model is one in which customers order directly from the counter and pick up their food when you call their name or number.
• Upsell: Influencing or persuading diners to select a higher margin item and/or add-ons.
• 86: Removing a specific dish from your menu because you’ve run out of one of the key ingredients.
• Table turnover rate: How long customers spend in your restaurant from the moment they sit down to the moment they leave. If three different parties occupy a specific table during a specific meal (e.g. dinner) your average table turnover rate for the dinner rush would be 3.
• Lead time: The time it takes to prepare an item from beginning to end.
• OOS: Out of stock. When a specific ingredient is not available due to issues with forecasting of needs, supply chain problems, or increased demand. This became a major point of contention during the pandemic.
• Uptime: The amount of time that you are “open for business” on delivery apps. Higher uptime = more orders.
• Downtime: The amount of time that you are “closed for business” due to a rush, staffing issues etc. Higher downtime = fewer orders.
• BOH/FOH: Back-of-house & front-of-house. BOH is any non-customer facing area of your restaurant. cooks etc. FOH is any area of your restaurant that customers will interact with during their experience.

Logistics-related restaurant terminology

• Third-party apps: Also known as food delivery platforms, third-party apps are desktop and/or mobile applications that customers use to order food. Examples include Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub and Caviar.
• D2C: Or direct-to-consumer, is a first-party delivery platform that your restaurant owns & operates at low to no commission.
• Delivery radius: The specific distance that your restaurant (or a delivery app when applicable) is willing to go to deliver food to customers. The average delivery radius is around 5 miles.
• Delivery cycle time: The time between when an order is placed and when an order is delivered.

Financial restaurant terminology

• Promotions: A deal or discount within the delivery apps designed to increase the number of orders you receive. When running promotions with an app like Uber Eats, you are usually expected to cover the cost of the discount + a small fee to the third party app company. While these fees can add up, the increased orders received from promotions can still result in a higher profit.
• Cash flow: the amount of cash being transferred into and out of your restaurant. Cash inflow consists of the money received from customers and other financing sources like loans.
• Commission: [In delivery] the amount you’re required to pay a delivery app for being listed & selling on their platform. When it comes to third party apps, commission rates for restaurants generally fall in the 15-30% range.
• Cost of goods: Or COGS, is the total cost of all the ingredients you must use to prepare everything on your menu (down to the garnish of cilantro or ketchup packet).
• Net profit margin: Your business’ profitability ratio – how much revenue you earn compared to how much it costs you to earn that revenue.
• Bottom line: Also known as net income, the bottom line is what your restaurant makes after all of your expenses have been deducted from your total revenue.

Terminology related to restaurant innovation

• Ghost kitchen: A ghost kitchen, also known as a dark kitchen, virtual kitchen, shadow kitchen or commissary kitchen, is a food preparation facility that prepares meals for delivery orders. You can think of a ghost kitchen as a restaurant without dine-in seating or a commercial kitchen optimized for fulfilling delivery orders. A ghost kitchen can be used to launch an entirely new restaurant, or to increase an existing restaurant’s reach by creating new “virtual storefronts” in different areas.
• Virtual brand: Or virtual restaurant, is an online-only restaurant storefront that receives and fulfills orders entirely through delivery. While virtual restaurants don’t necessarily have a branded brick and mortar, they are generally operated by existing brick & mortar restaurants – which is what makes them different from ghost kitchens.

You're now a restaurant-lingo expert!

If you made it to this point, you’re well on your way to becoming a walking restaurant encyclopedia. Remember to print or share this glossary with your team to ensure everyone in your restaurant is speaking the same language. Get started with Otter today!