Japanese for Restaurant Kitchen Staff and Floor Work

The call-and-response that runs the shop

Everything in a Japanese restaurant is announced. A guest arrives and the floor calls it; an order comes in and the floor calls it; the kitchen echoes it; the dish is ready and the kitchen calls it; the floor confirms it is going out. The rhythm exists so that nobody has to walk over and ask, and it only works if every call gets a reply. Your first job is not to cook or serve well. It is to echo instantly and loudly, because a call that dies in silence is repeated, and a repeated call is a slower service.

The table below is the common core. Your shop will use some of these, drop others, and add a few of its own, and the head chef or floor manager will not think to teach them because to them the calls are just how the room sounds. Ask on your first day: uchi no kakegoe o oshiete kudasai, please teach me our calls. Write them down, then say them under your breath during the first service until they come by themselves.

Numbers and counters for plates, tables, and guests

Orders are numbers, and the numbers come with counters that change shape. Guests are counted with mei and the honorific sama on the floor: ichimei-sama, nimei-sama, sanmei-sama. Tables and seats take ban: ichiban, niban, sanban. Plates of food take sara, drinks in glasses take hai, bottles take hon, and the general counter tsu covers almost anything when you are not sure. The counters post on this blog goes deeper; here you need only the first ten of each and the habit of saying the table before the item, because that is how the kitchen files the ticket.

Sara has irregular readings for one and two, hitosara and futasara, then goes regular: sansara, yonsara, gosara. Hai becomes ippai, nihai, sanbai, and hon becomes ippon, nihon, sanbon. Say each set aloud to ten before your first shift, because the counters are where a new member of staff is most often asked to repeat.

Prep verbs with readings

Shikomi, prep, fills the hours before service, and the instructions in it are verbs plus an amount. The head chef says tamanegi o mijingiri ni shite, and you need to know both the vegetable and the cut. The table gives the verbs you will hear most, in dictionary form so that you recognise them in any ending; instructions usually arrive as the te form, kitte, muite, yudete. Reply with the polite masu form and the object: hai, tamanegi kirimasu. That single reply shape carries you through the whole prep list.

Cleanliness and safety in a narrow kitchen

A Japanese kitchen is usually small, hot, and full of people moving fast with knives and pans, so the safety language is about announcing yourself. Ushiro tōrimasu when you pass behind someone, atsui desu when you carry a hot pan, hōchō okimasu when you set a knife down. Hygiene lines are announced too: staff say te o araimashita on returning to the line, and date checks are spoken aloud. If you are hurt, say it at once. A cut finger reported now is a plaster; hidden, it is a food safety problem.

Allergy calls travel from the floor to the kitchen and must be echoed back, because a missed one is the most serious mistake a restaurant can make. Repeat the allergen and the table: sanban, tamago arerugī, ryōkai.

How orders are called and confirmed

The order call has a fixed order of its own: table, items with quantities, drinks, then any change. The kitchen echoes the items, not the table, and calls the table again when the dish is up. Changes come with nuki for leaving something out and ōme for extra; a rush is isogi de. A cancellation is called with kyanseru and the kitchen answers with whether the dish has been started, because that decides what happens next. Below is one full exchange as it sounds on a normal night, floor first, kitchen second.

Asking the chef a question in five words

During service the head chef has no time for a full sentence, and asking one anyway marks you as new. The skill is the five-word question: the object, the point of doubt, and desu ka. Kore de ii desu ka with the plate held up is the whole conversation. Save the full polite forms for before and after service, when a question about why something is done a certain way is welcome and often answered at length. The chef's reply in service will be a word, ii yo or chigau, and chigau is not an insult; it is information.

Running low on something is a report, not a question, and it has to come before the last portion goes out. Kiresō desu, about to run out, gives the chef time; nakunarimashita, run out, gives the floor an apology to make.

Hearing instructions at speed and confirming them

Instructions in service are two or three words in plain form: sore totte, sara dashite, sanban sagete. There is no kudasai, and the speed is the point. Your reply is hai plus the verb in masu form, and the repeat is what tells the chef you heard the right thing. When you catch half, repeat the half and ask for the rest as a question. When you catch nothing, say so at once with mō ichido, because a wrong guess in a kitchen is a plate in the bin. Over the first month the shortened forms become normal, and you will start using them toward newer staff yourself.

Closing duties and the end of the night

After last orders the language changes from calls to reports. Closing, shime, is a checklist, and each item is reported done to the person in charge as you finish it: gas off, fridge checked, floor mopped, rubbish out, tomorrow's prep done. The shape is the noun, a pause, and the past tense, and it is said even when the manager watched you do it, because the sentence is the record. Ask what the house list is on your first night and say each item aloud as you complete it until the list lives in your mouth rather than on the wall.

Shift-change phrases

Restaurants greet every arriving shift with ohayō gozaimasu whatever the hour, and staff finishing a shift ask permission to go up, agatte ii desu ka, before they leave the line. Handover between an early shift, hayaban, and a late shift, osoban, is a sentence about what is still open: which tables are waiting, what is running low, what the chef asked for. The staff meal, makanai, has its own small ritual of itadakimasu and gochisōsama desu, and skipping it is noticed more than you would expect.

Learn the house set, then a first-week plan

No two restaurants call the same way. A sushi counter, a ramen shop, a family restaurant chain, and an izakaya each have their own set of calls, their own name for the pass, and their own reply to a guest's request. The calls in this guide are the ones most kitchens share, but the first thing to do on day one is ask for the house set, write it down, and say it under your breath through the first service. The plan below assumes you have that list in your pocket by the second shift.

• Shift one: ask for the house calls, echo every call you hear even when it is not for you, and learn the table numbering
• Shift two: counters to ten for guests, tables, plates, glasses, and bottles, said aloud while you clear and reset
• Shift three: the order-call exchange from the floor side and the kitchen side, with one nuki and one kyanseru rehearsed
• Shifts four to seven: the prep verbs used for real with a hai plus masu reply, the closing checklist said aloud item by item, and one five-word question to the chef each day