The restaurant library
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Practical guides, tool comparisons, and the research behind them. Start with a question, a job, or the name of a tool.
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649 results to explore
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
Gross profit margin
Gross profit margin is sales minus Cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as a percentage of sales: the share of each dollar left after paying for the food and drink itself.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
Hallucination
A hallucination is when an AI model states something false as if it were true, producing confident, fluent, and completely wrong information.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
Labor cost percentage
Labor cost percentage is total labor cost (wages, salaries, taxes, and benefits) divided by sales over a given period.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
Loyalty program
A loyalty program is a structured scheme that rewards repeat visits with points, perks, or status, turning occasional guests into regulars.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.