Guides
Restaurant Terms: 50 Words Explained in Plain Language
Restaurant vocabulary is a mixture: some words from Russian, some from English, some local. A new manager confuses food cost with waste and prep with production. Here are fifty of the most-used terms, defined and placed in context.
01The floor and service
Floor vocabulary is the daily language of waiters, hosts and managers. Most of it is about time: who arrived when, how long they waited, when the table freed up.
- Seating — a new party taking a table. An evening of 40 tables × 2 seatings is 80 parties.
- Table turnover — how many times a table is occupied in an evening. The gap between 1.4 and 2.1 is 50% of your capacity.
- Booking — reserving a table in advance, with a time, party size and phone number.
- Host — the person who greets guests at the door and seats them.
- Waiter call — the guest summons staff without leaving the table, choosing the staff type: waiter, barman, hookah attendant.
- Pre-check — the bill shown to the guest before payment; not a fiscal receipt.
- Shift — one working period with an open, a close and a cash balance.
- Hall — a defined area of the venue: main room, terrace, VIP. Each has its own assigned waiter.
02Menu and kitchen
Kitchen terms fall into two groups: the dish itself (recipe, yield, portion) and the process (prep, order state). Mixing them up produces costing errors.
- Tech card — a dish's composition in grams, its yield and its cost.
- Yield — the net product after trimming. Around 80% for carrots, 70% for bone-in meat.
- Food cost (money) — the ingredient value of one portion. An internal figure, never shown to guests.
- Food cost (percent) — cost divided by selling price. Around 30% for plov, 10–15% for drinks, 40–45% for steak.
- Modifier — an option attached to a dish: a sauce, a larger portion, a spice level, with min/max limits.
- Stop-list — the list of temporarily unavailable dishes. When an ingredient runs out, the dish leaves the guest menu.
- Prep — semi-finished items made before service: sauces, stock, cut vegetables.
- Waste — spoiled or incorrectly made product. Counted separately and never hidden in the dish cost.
- Order states — not sent → sent → cooking → ready → served. The time in each stage is recorded for reporting.
- Macros — calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates. Stored on the dish card; important for fitness-minded and family guests.
03Money, payments and fiscal rules
This group raises the most questions in Uzbek practice: which code is needed where, whose commission is whose, and what to do about cash.
- Average check — revenue divided by the number of bills. Only useful when sliced by channel, hour and waiter.
- Contribution margin — selling price minus cost, in money. Menu decisions are made on this, not on percentages.
- MXIK / IKPU — the fiscal classification code for goods. Mandatory for uploading menus to Yandex Eats and Uzum Tezkor.
- Acquiring fee — the payment provider's share, usually 1–1.5%. Not to be confused with aggregator commission.
- Aggregator commission — what Yandex Eats or Uzum Tezkor take, typically 20–30%.
- Cashback — a share returned to the guest's balance. Unlike a discount, that money can only be spent with you.
- Promo code — a channel-measurement tool: a separate code per source, limited by a schedule.
- Upsell and cross-sell — offering a larger version and adding a companion dish. Modifiers do the first; a "goes with" block does the second.
04Digital channels and hardware
Words that entered restaurant vocabulary in the last five years. Most name a device or a channel, so don't confuse them with "the system": POS is a system, KDS is a screen, QR is a channel.
- POS — the till system: orders, receipts, shifts, stock. iiko and r_keeper are the most common.
- KDS — kitchen display system: orders on a screen with states instead of paper tickets.
- QR menu — a menu and ordering flow opened on the guest's phone from a code on the table.
- Kiosk — a self-service terminal: no table to pick, just "dine in / takeaway".
- Mini App — a full catalog page that opens inside Telegram, with no install required.
- Dark kitchen — a kitchen with no dining room, working only for delivery and pickup.
- Delivery zone — a polygon on the map with its own fee, minimum order and assigned branch.
- Offline mode — carrying on from a local server when the internet drops, syncing to the cloud later.
- Per-channel visibility — showing a dish only in some channels: the business lunch in the hall, big sets on delivery.
05Reporting terms
These words appear on the reports page and are often misread. The commonest error is taking "sold" to mean a bill closed at the till: an order that was simply never cancelled counts as sold too.
- Heat map — revenue by weekday and hour; the staffing rota is built from it.
- Menu engineering — the profit-by-popularity matrix: star, workhorse, puzzle, dead weight.
- Order source — where an order came from: QR, website, iOS, Android, Telegram, operator, aggregator.
- Service time — the time between order stages; the long stage shows where the problem is.
- Call statistics — which table calls most often and the average response time.
- Cross-sell report — which dishes land in the same bill together.