Kitchen Lingo: 10 Common Terms Explained

pineapple upside down cake from the dessert spring menu change last month

Our restaurant is doing a big menu change tonight. It might not feel like spring outside (not even a little bit) but it's time for some spring flavors in this joint. I did a dessert menu change about a month ago and didn't envy the confused looking line cooks as they came in today, knowing they had a prep list a mile long and no clue what to do if the chefs weren't around to explain any of the new mise. Man, were they in the weeds! 

Mise? In the weeds? Whose blog am I reading, Anthony Bourdain's?

Is what no one is thinking right now, but I can pretend (does Anthony Bourdain even have a blog?) I thought it'd be fun to get up front with some kitchen lingo so you can feel like a real pro the next time you're eating out. 

86

You might already be familiar with this one, since it's used in other industries. It means the kitchen is out of an entree/wine/side/etc. It's a real bummer to walk into a restaurant and see the food you were so excited about getting written and underlined on the 86 board. 

Mise

Short for mise en place, which is French for "everything in it's place." Mise refers to all the ingredients or components of a dish; the mise for something as simple as a salad can include mixed greens, candied walnuts, cranberries, goat cheese and some kind of vinaigrette. Having your mise in order is the best way to avoid being in the weeds. 

In the weeds

If you're in the weeds, you're kind of fucked. This can refer to prep, when the prep list has twenty items on it and you've only gotten through three of them and dinner service is starting in half an hour, but usually it refers to someone dying on the line. The tickets are piling up on the board and you were short on prep to begin with and the whole thing is about to go down in flames. A strong cook can work through the stress and clear the board, but sometimes once you're in the weeds, you're stuck there all night. 

All day

This is the number of orders for a dish currently on the board. If a cook has a bunch of tickets coming in and thinks he's only working on two risotto, he might call out to the chef to clarify and the chef will call back "3 risotto all day," letting the cook know he needs to fire one more risotto. 

Fire

Fire means it's time to start cooking a dish. If a large party has put their entire meal in with the server, the salad course will be fired first, then the entrees will be fired after they start eating their salads, and so on. This ensures food isn't sitting too long and dying on the pass.

The pass

Once you've finished plating a dish, it goes up on the pass for servers or runners to get it to the table. The pass is just a long, flat surface, with or without heat lamps, depending on if it's a hot or cold plate. If an ice cream dish sits too long at the pass, the chef will probably scrap it and you'll have to make it on the fly. 

On the fly

This means you start cooking a dish pronto, either because the server forgot to put in the ticket or you missed the ticket entirely. If a server brings back a dish made incorrectly or not to the guests liking, you're doing it on the fly and now it's 911. 

911 

Similar to on the fly in terms of urgency, this is another term that is kind of self-explanatory. If something is 911, it's an emergency and needs to be done immediately. Maybe you still have five or six things to mise before dinner service, but the doors just opened and the tickets are about to roll in; figure out what's 911 and forget about the rest until it slows down.

Deuce

No, I'm not talking about that kind of deuce. In a restaurant, a deuce is a party of two. 

Heard

The best way to answer the chef when it's the middle of service and they rattle off the tickets on the board. It's just what it sounds like, an acknowledgment that you've heard what's been said.