If you’ve ever watched a high-stakes cooking competition, you know how chaotic things can get in a restaurant kitchen. You hear a flurry of orders followed by a cry of “four salmon all day!” To an outsider, it sounds like a deadline; to a chef, it’s the only way to keep the kitchen from spiraling into a mess of overcooked fish and missed tickets. But what does this restaurant slang actually mean?
What Does All Day Mean In A Kitchen?
All day is simply a readjusted verbal count that means the same as all together. It is a way of asking how many of a particular menu item should be made at this exact moment. For example, in the aforementioned salmon scenario, it may be that there have been two different orders involving salmon that were called one at a time. The cooks have received orders for one salmon, then two salmon.
Then, a few minutes later, another order for salmon comes in. It can be confusing when so many different orders for the same dish come in. It is even possible, in a busy or disorganized kitchen, that the third order may be confused as a repeat of the last order. The kitchen can also lose track of how many in total are needed. So, the head cook may ask, “How many salmon all day?” Or, to stave off any confusion, an expediter (or waiter) may follow these individual orders with “That’s four salmon all day.”
If a waiter is waiting on 4 orders of a mushroom appetizer, and now needs two more on top of this, they may say, “I need two more mushroom apps. That’s 6 all day!”
Bonus Restaurant Lingo: BEHIND!
In a busy restaurant kitchen and on cooking competition shows, you’ll hear chefs yelling “Behind!” quite often. They say this when they are moving around. “Behind” is an important part of restaurant lingo. It prevents accidents and injuries.
Someone in a restaurant kitchen will shout “Behind!” when they are walking behind someone at a workstation, especially someone who is cooking. They are warning that person that they are moving behind them so that they do not suddenly turn around and have a collision.
This prevents the person whose back is turned from causing the other person to drop what they are carrying. It also prevents a person cooking food from turning around while holding a pan of hot food, thus colliding with the person moving behind them and causing a potentially serious burn.
