Kitchen staff need to be able to communicate not just about who is doing what but also how the clientele are behaving. Because language adapts to its speakers’ needs, this has resulted in a vocabulary tailored toward obscuring meaning from those not familiar with the culinary environment. In this way, restaurant workers can convey valuable information without stirring up offense or confusion among those dining in the establishment.
Let’s uncover the many slang phrases that kitchen staff use to discuss customers, the way they behave, and what the staff don’t want visitors to know.
Diners and Dashers When Guests Cause Problems
The job of servers and other restaurant workers is to keep service running smoothly with minimal disruptions. The food should maintain its quality and meet customer expectations—and as any food service worker will share, guests seem to interfere with this process as often as they can. This has given rise to covert slang kitchen staff can use to communicate when things are not going according to plan.
In the weeds
When the cooks and line workers fall behind, the last people they want to know are the diners. Guests become agitated when service is slow, so it behooves the kitchen not to directly state that they’re having trouble keeping up. Instead, they might say they’re “in the weeds,” indicating that everyone needs to be working quickly in order to keep up with standards of timeliness. The phrase can be used in its alternative form, “weeded,” to describe one station that isn’t keeping the pace.
Kill
This verb is specifically used to instruct cooks to prepare meat in a way that’s not intended by the restaurant (and is generally considered destroying the food). For instance, if a guest requests a steak that is very well done, the server may instruct the cook to “kill it.” Similarly, chicken can be extremely overcooked to comply with a guest’s request.
Wax (a table)
To wax a table means to give that table extra special service (ideally without making other guests feel that their experience is lackluster in comparison; this often requires some discretion). The origins of this phrase are unclear, but it could refer to the process of waxing linens to firm them and make them appear crisper and more professional, which would suit a guest of distinction. Usually, a server is instructed to wax the table if someone important, such as the owner, is visiting.
Cropdusting
Sometimes, servers need to deal with customers who are not making their job easy. The humorous slang term “cropdusting” is code in many service industries for getting revenge on such guests by passing gas near them. The server makes a quick getaway so that the diners are none the wiser of the smell’s origin.
Camper
In order to keep service flowing smoothly, restaurants utilize sometimes complex metrics and trackers that determine how long the average party takes to eat, pay, and leave. Having a group stay for too long can interrupt business flow, causing newcomers to wait longer than expected for a table and blocking the server from moving on to other customers. A “camper” is a diner who has finished eating and drinking but remains at their table to talk.
Stretch
Guests often have the impression that a restaurant is crafting a meal solely for them, but in reality, most food-focused businesses share large portions among many customers. For instance, soup is made in dozens of servings at once, and it is only customized according to a diner’s requests once it is ready to be served. When the kitchen is finding itself running low on the ingredients it needs to prepare a certain meal, they might say they can “stretch” it—that is, dilute or otherwise slightly amend the original recipe to make that one final plate work. After that, they’ve run out of ingredients!
Shoe
Not all derisive slang in the kitchen is directed at problematic customers. If a cook constantly botches meals or can’t keep up with work, he might be called a “shoe.” It’s believed that this insult arose from an older tradition in which some European chefs wore clogs rather than shoes in the kitchen. If a cook was clumsy, they would often stumble and make a fool of themselves in the clogs, and this concept has grown to encompass the idea that a bad cook is clumsy or laugh-worthy.
Sometimes, people create slang to ease their own stresses and find a more comical way to vent their frustrations. In the restaurant industry, it should come as no surprise that many of those hidden pieces of lingo are directed at customers—either what servers are suffering with or what the kitchen doesn’t want their guests to know. But this isn’t the only type of kitchen slang! In fact, many of the culinary delights that we know and love today found their origins in some highly unusual phrases, and we’ll explore those next time.
