Glossary
The restaurant + AI glossary.
The vocabulary of running a restaurant and the vocabulary of the AI that now helps run it, defined plainly, in one place. Every term links from the guides so you never hit a word you do not know.
86 (to 86 an item)
To 86 an item is kitchen and floor shorthand for a dish or ingredient that is sold out or pulled from service and can no longer be ordered.
AI agent
An AI agent is software that uses an AI model to pursue a goal across multiple steps, taking actions and reacting to results, rather than answering a single question and stopping.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google places at the top of many search results, answering the query directly above the traditional list of links.
API
An API (application programming interface) is a defined way for two software systems to exchange data automatically, and it is the basis of every integration between your tools.
Average check
Average check is total sales divided by the number of guests (or the number of tickets), showing how much a typical customer spends per visit.
Average unit volume (AUV)
Average unit volume (AUV) is the average annual sales generated by a single location, a headline benchmark for how a concept performs per unit.
Back of house
Back of house (BOH) is everything behind the kitchen doors: the cooks, prep, dish pit, receiving, and storage that produce the food and control food and labor cost.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and it both passes ranking authority to your site and can send real referral traffic from diners.
Break-even point
The break-even point is the level of sales at which total revenue exactly equals total cost, so the business makes neither a profit nor a loss.
Churn
Churn is the rate at which guests stop coming back, the quiet loss of regulars that erodes revenue even when new customers keep walking in.
Citation
A citation is any online mention of your restaurant's name, address, and phone number (NAP), whether or not it links to your site, and consistent citations strengthen local search ranking.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who click a link out of everyone who saw the message or listing it appeared in.
Cloud POS
A cloud POS is a point-of-sale whose software and data live on remote servers reached over the internet, rather than on a computer locked inside the restaurant.
Commissary kitchen
A commissary kitchen is a licensed, often shared commercial kitchen used for prep, production, catering, or delivery brands, rather than for serving guests on site.
Comps
Comps are items or checks given to a guest at no charge (complimentary), typically to fix a mistake, recover a bad experience, or extend hospitality.
Contribution margin
Contribution margin is a menu item's price minus its variable cost, the dollar amount each sale contributes toward covering fixed costs and, once those are covered, profit.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete a desired action, such as placing an order or booking a table, out of everyone who had the chance to.
Cost of goods sold (COGS)
Cost of goods sold (COGS) is the direct cost of the food and beverage you actually sold in a period, the ingredient half of your [[term:prime-cost]].
Covers
Covers is the number of individual guests served in a period, one cover per person, used to measure volume and plan staffing and prep.
Customer data platform (CDP)
A customer data platform (CDP) unifies guest information from all your systems into a single profile per person, so you can actually see and act on who your regulars are.
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total profit a guest brings over the whole span of their relationship with you, not just what they spend on one visit.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) is both the software and the practice of storing guest information and using it to build repeat business across the whole customer lifecycle.
Demand forecasting
Demand forecasting is predicting how many guests, orders, or specific menu items you will need to serve in a coming period so you can staff and buy accordingly.
Drive-thru AI
Drive-thru AI is voice AI applied to the drive-thru lane, taking a guest's spoken order at the speaker and sending it to the kitchen without a staff member on the headset.
Dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing is adjusting menu or item prices based on demand, time of day, day of week, or channel, rather than holding one fixed price for every situation.
Email deliverability
Email deliverability is the share of the emails you send that actually reach the inbox, rather than the spam folder or a bounce.
EMV (chip card)
EMV is the chip-card standard that authenticates a card with an embedded chip instead of a magnetic stripe, shifting fraud liability and shaping POS hardware.
Expeditor (expo)
The expeditor, or expo, is the person at the pass who calls and paces tickets, coordinates the stations, and checks every plate for accuracy before it leaves the kitchen.
Fast casual
Fast casual is a restaurant format between quick-service and full-service: guests order at a counter as in fast food, but the food quality, ingredients, and prices are closer to a sit-down restaurant.
Featured snippet
A featured snippet is the answer box at the very top of some Google results, where Google quotes a short answer pulled directly from a web page.
First-party data
First-party data is the customer information you collect directly and own outright (names, emails, phone numbers, order history, visit frequency) as opposed to data a marketplace or platform holds on your behalf.
First-party ordering
First-party ordering is when guests order directly through channels you own (your website, app, or QR menu) so you keep the customer relationship, the data, and most of the margin.
Food cost percentage
Food cost percentage is the cost of the ingredients you used, divided by the sales those ingredients generated, over a set period.
Food waste
Food waste is edible food a restaurant buys but never sells, lost to spoilage, over-prep, trim, and plate waste, and it is a direct hit to food-cost margin.
Front of house
Front of house (FOH) is everything the guest sees and interacts with: the dining room, bar, host stand, and the servers, bartenders, and hosts who run it.
Full-service restaurant (FSR)
A full-service restaurant (FSR) is a sit-down format with table service, where guests are seated, served by staff, and pay after the meal, and it carries the widest and most complex set of operations of any format.
Generative engine optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your restaurant show up and get recommended inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.
Ghost kitchen
A ghost kitchen (also called a dark or cloud kitchen) is a delivery-only cooking operation with no dining room and no walk-up counter, built to fulfill online orders.
Gift card
A gift card is prepaid stored value sold to guests, counted as a liability until it is redeemed and doubling as a low-cost acquisition and loyalty tool.
Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is the free Google listing that controls how your restaurant appears in Google Search and Maps: your hours, photos, menu, reviews, and the button to call, direct, or order.
Gross profit margin
Gross profit margin is sales minus [[term:cogs]], expressed as a percentage of sales: the share of each dollar left after paying for the food and drink itself.
Guest check
A guest check is the itemized bill for a single table or order, the unit of sale your POS opens, rings items into, and closes when it is paid.
Hallucination
A hallucination is when an AI model states something false as if it were true, producing confident, fluent, and completely wrong information.
Handheld POS
A handheld POS is a mobile terminal a server carries to take orders and payments tableside, firing tickets straight to the kitchen and turning tables faster.
Interchange fee
The interchange fee is the portion of every card transaction that the networks pass to the cardholder's bank, and it is the largest, non-negotiable part of processing cost.
Kitchen display system (KDS)
A kitchen display system (KDS) is a set of kitchen screens that replaces paper tickets, routing each order to the right station and timing it through the cook.
Labor cost percentage
Labor cost percentage is total labor cost (wages, salaries, taxes, and benefits) divided by sales over a given period.
Large language model (LLM)
A large language model (LLM) is the type of AI, trained on vast amounts of text, that powers tools like ChatGPT by predicting and generating human-like language.
Local SEO
Local SEO is the practice of making your restaurant show up when nearby people search for somewhere to eat, in Google's map pack, local results, and increasingly in AI-generated recommendations.
Loyalty program
A loyalty program is a structured scheme that rewards repeat visits with points, perks, or status, turning occasional guests into regulars.
Map pack (local pack)
The map pack (also called the local pack or 3-pack) is the block of three local business listings shown with a map at the top of a Google search, above the ordinary blue links.
Menu engineering
Menu engineering is the deliberate design and layout of a menu to steer guests toward the items that are both popular and high-margin, using sales and cost data on every dish.
Mise en place
Mise en place is the kitchen discipline of preparing and organizing every ingredient and tool before service begins, so cooks can execute without scrambling.
NAP consistency
NAP consistency means your restaurant's Name, Address, and Phone number are spelled and formatted identically everywhere they appear online.
Natural language processing (NLP)
Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of AI concerned with getting computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language, whether written or spoken.
No-show
A no-show is a guest who books a reservation and neither arrives nor cancels, leaving a table held empty during service.
Occupancy cost
Occupancy cost is your rent plus the related costs of holding the space (property tax, building insurance, common-area charges), usually tracked as a percentage of sales.
Online review
An online review is a public star rating and written comment a guest leaves on a platform like Google or Yelp, and collectively reviews are one of the strongest local-ranking and trust signals a restaurant has.
Open rate
Open rate is the share of delivered emails that recipients open, the first sign your subject line and sender name earned attention.
Opt-in
Opt-in is a guest's explicit, recorded consent to receive marketing, and it is a legal requirement for email and SMS in most places.
Par level
A par level is the target on-hand quantity of an ingredient you keep in stock, the point at which falling inventory tells you to reorder and how much to bring it back up to.
Payment processor
A payment processor is the service that moves a card payment from the guest's bank to your account, authorizing the charge and settling the funds.
PCI compliance
PCI compliance is meeting the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, the security rules every business that accepts cards must follow to protect cardholder data.
Point of sale (POS)
A point of sale (POS) is the system you use to ring up orders and take payment, and it is the hub where your sales, menu, and guest data are recorded.
Portion control
Portion control is the discipline of standardizing the exact serving size of every menu item so that food cost, plate consistency, and guest expectations all stay predictable.
Prep list
A prep list is the daily, quantified checklist of mise-en-place tasks (what to make, portion, and stock, and how much) that the kitchen works through before service.
Prime cost
Prime cost is the sum of a restaurant's total cost of goods sold (food and beverage) plus total labor cost, expressed as a percentage of sales.
Prompt
A prompt is the instruction or question you give an AI model, and how it is worded largely determines the quality and usefulness of what comes back.
Quick-service restaurant (QSR)
A quick-service restaurant (QSR), also called fast food, is a limited-service format built for speed and high volume: a focused menu, counter or drive-thru ordering, and fast, standardized production.
Referral program
A referral program incentivizes existing guests to bring in new ones, usually by rewarding both the guest who refers and the friend they send.
Retention rate
Retention rate is the share of guests who come back over a given period, the positive mirror of churn.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique that feeds an AI model your own current documents at the moment of a question, so its answer is grounded in real data instead of only what it memorized during training.
Review velocity
Review velocity is the rate at which a restaurant earns new reviews over time, and a steady, recent flow signals to search engines and diners that the business is active and popular.
RevPASH (revenue per available seat hour)
RevPASH (revenue per available seat hour) is total revenue divided by the number of seats multiplied by the hours open, measuring how productively every seat earns.
Same-store sales
Same-store sales (or comparable sales) measures year-over-year sales growth at locations open at least a year, stripping out the effect of new openings.
Schema markup
Schema markup is structured code you add to your website that labels your information (menu, hours, location, cuisine, reviews) in a format search engines and AI can read precisely.
Segmentation
Segmentation is dividing your guests into meaningful groups (lapsed regulars, VIPs, first-timers, big spenders) so you can send each the right message instead of blasting everyone the same thing.
Self-order kiosk
A self-order kiosk is a customer-facing touchscreen where guests place and pay for their own order without a cashier, freeing staff and prompting add-ons every time.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is using AI to automatically score whether reviews, messages, and social posts are positive, negative, or neutral, and to surface the themes behind them.
Service charge
A service charge is a mandatory amount, usually a set percentage, that a restaurant adds to the check, distinct from a voluntary tip the guest chooses.
SMS marketing
SMS marketing is sending promotional and transactional text messages, from offers to table-ready alerts, to guests who have opted in to receive them.
Star rating
A star rating is the aggregate 1-to-5 score a restaurant carries on a review platform, the single number a diner (and increasingly an AI assistant) sees first.
Table turn time
Table turn time is the average time a party occupies a table from seating to when it is cleared and ready for the next party.
Third-party delivery
Third-party delivery is order fulfillment through a marketplace app like DoorDash or Uber Eats that brings you demand in exchange for a commission on each order, typically 15 to 30 percent.
Ticket time
Ticket time is the elapsed time from when an order is fired to when it is completed, the core measure of how fast the kitchen turns tickets during service.
Tip pooling
Tip pooling is combining some or all of the staff's tips into a single pot and redistributing it by a set formula, rather than each worker keeping only what they were tipped directly.
Upselling
Upselling is prompting a guest to add to or upgrade their order (a side, a drink, a larger size, a dessert) at the moment they are deciding, lifting the average check.
Virtual brand
A virtual brand is a delivery-only menu concept run out of an existing restaurant's kitchen, sold under a different name purely to reach more customers online.
Voice AI
Voice AI is software that answers phone calls or drive-thru orders in a natural spoken conversation, understanding what a caller wants and responding without a human on the line.
Void
A void is the cancellation of an item or a check on the POS before it is paid, a routine correction that is also one of the most common ways cash and product quietly go missing.
Waitlist
A waitlist is the ordered queue of walk-in guests waiting for a table, now usually run digitally so parties can be quoted an honest wait and texted the moment their table is ready.
Walk-in
A walk-in is a guest who arrives without a reservation hoping to be seated; the same word also names the walk-in cooler, the room-sized refrigerator where a kitchen stores stock.
Webhook
A webhook is an automated message one app sends another the moment an event happens, such as a new order, so systems stay in sync in real time.
Win-back campaign
A win-back campaign is automated email or SMS outreach that re-engages guests who have stopped coming, before they are lost for good.
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