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Glossary
94 results in Glossary
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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.
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Loyalty program
A loyalty program is a structured scheme that rewards repeat visits with points, perks, or status, turning occasional guests into regulars.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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NAP consistency
NAP consistency means your restaurant's Name, Address, and Phone number are spelled and formatted identically everywhere they appear online.
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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.
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No-show
A no-show is a guest who books a reservation and neither arrives nor cancels, leaving a table held empty during service.
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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.
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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.
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Open rate
Open rate is the share of delivered emails that recipients open, the first sign your subject line and sender name earned attention.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Retention rate
Retention rate is the share of guests who come back over a given period, the positive mirror of churn.
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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.