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
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.
- Glossary
NAP consistency
NAP consistency means your restaurant's Name, Address, and Phone number are spelled and formatted identically everywhere they appear online.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
No-show
A no-show is a guest who books a reservation and neither arrives nor cancels, leaving a table held empty during service.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
Open rate
Open rate is the share of delivered emails that recipients open, the first sign your subject line and sender name earned attention.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
Retention rate
Retention rate is the share of guests who come back over a given period, the positive mirror of churn.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.
- Glossary
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.