“86 the salmon, four burgers all day, one on the fly, hands!”
Outside a restaurant, that is gibberish. Inside one at 7:40 on a Saturday, it is a complete set of instructions.
Restaurant slang is the shorthand restaurant teams use to communicate orders, timing, problems, safety warnings, and guest information quickly during service. One warning before you memorize anything: this vocabulary is not standardized. The common terms show up almost everywhere, but most kitchens quietly invent a few of their own.
Restaurant Slang You Will Hear on Almost Every Shift
Start here. These are the words that come up in the first hour of the first shift.
86 / 86’d: An item is gone, sold out, or otherwise unavailable. Documented restaurant use goes back to at least the 1930s, though the exact origin is disputed.
All day: The running total of one item needed across every open ticket right now.
Behind: A warning that you are passing behind someone in a tight space.
Corner: Called before rounding a blind corner so nobody collides while carrying a full tray.
Hands: Food is up and needs a body to run it to the table immediately.
Heard: Acknowledgment that an instruction landed. Say it every time.
Fire: Start cooking this now.
Drop: Put an item in the fryer or on the heat, usually fries, wings, or pasta.
On the fly: Needed urgently, right now, ahead of everything else.
In the weeds: Buried, behind, and losing ground. Also, just “weeded.”
Pick up: Depending on the house, either an order that is ready or a call to start finishing a ticket.
Sharp/hot: Warnings that you are moving past someone with a knife or a hot pan.
Front-of-House Restaurant Slang
Server, host, and manager vocabulary. Most of this FOH slang is about seating, timing, and money.
Two-top/four-top/six-top: A table set for that many guests.
Deuce: A two-top.
Cover: One guest served. Sixty covers means sixty people, not sixty tables.
Campers: Guests who finished an hour ago and show no intention of leaving.
Double-sat: Two tables seated in your section at the same moment, usually right after you finally caught up.
Cut: Taken off the floor for the night once volume drops.
Comp: An item removed from the check at no charge, typically to fix a problem.
Void: An item cancelled before it was ever rung in or made.
Turn a table: Seat, serve, and reset a table for the next party.
Turn and burn: Move a table quickly because there is a wait.
Clopen: Closing one night and opening the next morning. Universally disliked.
Back-of-House and Kitchen Slang
The kitchen lingo side. Much of this BOH slang describes physical stations and the path a ticket takes through them.
Mise/mise en place: Everything prepped, portioned, and in position before service.
Expo: The person reading tickets, calling items, and controlling what leaves the pass.
Pass / window: The counter where finished plates wait to be run.
Line: The row of cooking stations, and by extension, the cooks working them.
Lowboy: The under-counter refrigerator on the line.
Chit/dupe/ticket: The printed order. Three words, same object.
Rail/board: The strip holding incoming tickets in front of the line.
Dead plate: A finished plate that was never run and is now unservable.
Dying in the window: A plate sitting under the heat lamp, losing quality by the second.
Refire: Remake an item, usually after a mistake or a send-back.
Flash: A few seconds back on the heat to bring something up to temp.
Kill it / burn it: Cook it very well done.
Bump: Clear a completed ticket off the rail or the screen.
Stretch it: Make a running-low ingredient last through the rest of service.
Most of these words outlived the paper they were named for. A ticket is a line on a screen, bumping is a tap, and 86’ing an item can update every ordering channel at once through centralized menu management. The rail went digital. The vocabulary did not.
Restaurant Slang Even Some Restaurant Glossaries Miss
These get used constantly and appear in almost none of the major restaurant terminology lists. As always, some kitchens use all of them, and some use none.
Walking in: Announces that a new order is entering the kitchen, usually just before expo reads the ticket out.
Order in: The same idea, telling the line a new ticket has arrived and is about to be called.
Sandbagging: Usage genuinely varies. In some kitchens, it means holding or pre-making food; in others, it means stacking tickets instead of sending them in order. Ask before you accuse anyone of it.
Garni: Shorthand for garnish. “What is the garni on the special?”
Pocket ticket: An order that was forgotten or never actually sent to the kitchen. Named for the server who finds it in an apron pocket forty minutes later.
Auctioning: Walking up to a table holding plates and asking who ordered what instead of knowing seat positions. It works. It also announces that you are new.
Cremate it / cremated: A joking call for something cooked far past well done.
What a Friday Night Actually Sounds Like
A made-up exchange, but not an unrealistic one.
Expo: “Order in! Two burgers, one salmon, one pasta, table nine.”
Grill: “Heard.”
Expo: “Fire the burgers, hold the pasta. We are 86 salmon after this ticket.”
Grill: “What is my burger all day?”
Expo: “Five all day. Behind you.”
Server: “Fries on the fly for twelve, I dropped a plate.”
Expo: “Two minutes. Hands in the window for nine!”
In plain English: a ticket arrived for table nine, and the grill cook confirmed hearing it. Expo wants the burgers started, the pasta held, and the line to know the salmon is sold out after this order. The cook asked how many burgers he owes across every open ticket. Five, and someone is squeezing past him. A server needs emergency fries for table twelve after dropping a plate. Expo quoted two minutes and called for hands to run table nine.
Why Do Restaurants Have So Much Slang?
Speed, safety, and coordination. “All day” replaces a sentence of mental arithmetic. “Heard” confirms a message in one syllable. “Behind,” “corner,” “hot,” and “sharp” are straightforward collision warnings in a room full of knives, boiling liquid, and people moving fast in a narrow space. During a rush, every word you do not have to say is a word someone else gets to use.
The Short Version
Every restaurant develops its own dialect, and you will always learn a few terms on the job that exist nowhere else. But the core restaurant lingo travels. Learn twenty of these, and your first rush stops sounding like noise and starts sounding like instructions.
Restaurant Slang FAQ
No. Terms like 86, heard, behind, and all day travel almost everywhere, but individual restaurants, regions, and cuisines build their own shorthand. Expect to pick up a few house-specific words in your first week anywhere new.
“All day” means the total number of one item currently needed across every open ticket. It saves the line from adding up four separate orders in their heads while the grill is full.
It usually means a new ticket has just landed, and the line should listen up for what is on it. Some kitchens use it only for large or urgent orders, so the exact usage varies by house.
Start with 86, behind, corner, hands, heard, fire, on the fly, all day, in the weeds, comp, cover, and two-top or four-top. Those cover most of what you will hear in a first shift.
