Glossary
Restaurant Host Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential restaurant host terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key restaurant host vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in restaurant host training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Back of house
- Kitchen areas.
- Cover
- One guest served.
- Floor plan
- Table map.
- Front of house
- Customer areas.
- Maître d’
- Head of the dining room.
- No-show
- Reservation that doesn’t come.
- Overbook
- Booking more than capacity.
- Pacing
- Spacing seatings.
- Pager
- Buzzer for waiting guests.
- Quote time
- Estimated wait.
- Rotation
- Seating servers in turn.
- Section
- Assigned tables.
- Turn
- Seating a table again.
- VIP
- Special guest.
- Walk-in
- Guest without reservation.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Restaurant Host practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Restaurant Host training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.