From the wikipedia link in the OP:
Many of the terms used are lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek and some are a bit racy or ribald, but are helpful mnemonic devices for short-order cooks and staff.
For a kitchen staff not fully fluent in English, diner lingo might be a lot easier to follow since terms like “dead eye” and “drown the kids” are more differentiated than “poached eggs” and “boiled eggs”.
Of course a number system would be optimal. Who came up with that? Chinese restaurants?
In restaurants that use number systems, do they doctor the pronunciation, like aviators do?
Tangentially, I was disappointed when, on my first trip to London, I never heard Cockney Rhyming Slang once. Couldn’t Adam and Eve it…
My mother swore that one time when she ordered breakfast, she specified that the orange juice needed to be fresh, and then overheard the waitress calling in the order to the cook.
“Orange juice. Must be!”
Watching “The Bear” made me realize that a restaurant kitchen has its own language. I guess I assumed that, since most trades have their own vocabularies, but it was interesting hearing it. It’s not “diner lingo”, but it’s unique.
When I worked as a cook 86 was still in use and “all day,” as mentioned above.
When I worked in (and briefly owned) a restaurant/coffee shop some 50 years ago, I loved the language–“Wreck 'em” meant an order of scrambled eggs.
We had lingo at McDonald’s 40 years ago.
A “turn lay” was put more patties on when you turn the current batch. A “pull lay” was when you remove the current batch.
We’d be told in a busy stretch “six six turn lay on quarters”
“Whiskey down” meant rye toast. In other words, it took three syllables to say what non-kitchen people could express in two. “Adam and Eve on a raft” was poached eggs on toast.
Haven’t thought of this stuff in a long time.
It’s just jargon that helps to make statements distinct and explicit. Sailors, tradespeople, pilots, medical staff, engineers, et cetera all have their own distinct jargon that they use vocationally.
Some of these terms, such as fish eyes, axle grease, or tube steak have made it into common vernacular (although they seem to have disappeared in recent years), while others are regional or specific to particular cuisines. Every kitchen I’ve worked in used “eighty-six” to indicate being out of an item or dish, but they all also had their own specific terminology. The best was a steakhouse where the head cook was a former Recon Marine who would mix Corps lingo in with kitchen jargon, which was unique. We got to hear a lot about Jody and what he was doing with our girlfriends.
I haven’t watched “The Bear” but I’ve seen a few clips and it seems like a pretty realistic portrayal of a working kitchen vice what you usually see on television, especially the screaming abuse and the frenetic pace of disaster management when a slam comes in.
I know people really like the Joan Crawford movie for some reason, but the [HBO miniseries](https://[quote=“Briny_Deep, post:30, topic:992529”] “Two chicken dinners, one without gravy.” [/quote]) is also far closer to the book (which is excellent) and frankly a better portrayal of the operation of a ‘Fifties chicken & waffles diner. Cain obviously did a lot of research to get the details of running a restaurant correct.
Stranger
There’s an ad in the current Wendy’s TV campaign poking fun at this.
Cuppa duppa java, anyone?
You are obviously not a MacDonald (my mother’s family name and my middle name). We’re all Macs to friends!
Did you mean to link to the (agreed, fantastic) HBO version? I’d love to see that clip.
I looked at the list and understood most of them. There are some that aren’t listed that I use and have had to explain to wait people – I like my fried eggs “stepped on” – over hard, break the yolk, it must not be runny at all. I should be able to pick the entire egg up and the plate doesn’t have any yolk on it. In New England I have zero issues describing it that way but in the midwest they look at me like I just beamed down from outer space when I describe it that way.
The Oxford in Missoula MT had their own menu that was part of the ambience (I particularly like “He Needs ‘Em” for Brains & Eggs). I’m not sure whether they still use it: according to my father (on whom be peace), it just hasn’t been the same since they swept up the sawdust and started admitting women.
Funnily enough, though diner lingo is a post-WWI development, almost nobody used the term until the 1970s. (I tried “diner lingo” and also “diner slang” and “diner jargon.”)
In 1963, one article appeared in the Lebanon [PA] Daily News titled “Passing of Diner Slang Is Bemoaned by Cook.” It was an AP syndicated article that apparently no one else thought worth printing.
The first appearance of “diner lingo” was a decade earlier, when the Tillie the Toiler comic devoted a 1952 Sunday strip to it. Even then it was a joke, with an older fill-in trying to remember what used to be said. Meat loaf was “mystery meat”; griddle cakes were “saddle blankets”; breaded veal cutlet was “a motorman’s mitt”; ham and eggs was “two cackleberries and a grunt”; hamburger was a “scrambled t-bone.”
Cackleberries for eggs was old-time slang but the phrase turns up nowhere. Two hits from the 1940s for hamburger as a scrambled t-bone and oddly one from 1925 saying it was the name for chili. One afterward from 1972 for hamburger but one from 1968 saying that it was really what we now call steak tartare. Nothing on “mortorman’s mitt” or “saddle blankets” as food slang. “Mystery meat” was used but not in connection with meat loaf.
That there was slang was real, but it probably had loads of regional variants. Most of what is reported comes from half-century old memories, not totally reliable. Even calling it “diner lingo” is suspect. Diners did exist after 1920, maybe 2000 of them. But they were outnumbered by at least an order of magnitude by soda fountains, and the lunch counters in neighborhood drug stores and discount stores like Woolworth’s. You might hear the slang any place you found soda jerks and they were legion, an estimated half million in the 30s and 40s.
I recall encountering it in the 1960s as a kid mostly in animated cartoons from the 1940s/50s. E.g. Bugs Bunny. Even then they were using it for humor as if it was already antique / anachronistic.
I wonder how much it’s one of those cultural ideas that grows in the telling and retelling? Where now we might believe it was widespread in the early 20th century, but it really wasn’t. Just used (a bit) in a handful of diners near where a couple of newspaper columnists worked, and they embellished the story for a humorous column or three and here we are today with a rumor far in excess of the reality.
All this is far distant from the idea of jargon. Jargon is short and simplified and direct. If it’s not your industry you won’t know it and it will seem opaque and possibly misleading. But the purpose is brevity and clarity. “Saddle blankets” and “motorman’s mitts” don’t add brevity nor clarity. Diner lingo, to the degree it was real, was either for obfuscation like carny slang when speaking in front of customers, or was for the private entertainment of the people using it.