Glossary

Cover

What is a cover in a restaurant?

A cover is one seated guest. A four-top that shows up as a full party counts as four covers; a solo diner at the bar is one. Covers are the restaurant's base unit of volume: kitchens prep by expected covers, hosts pace seating by covers per slot, and reports total covers per service. The word matters commercially too, because some reservation platforms bill per cover: OpenTable's network fee is $1.00 to $1.50 per seated network cover at list price, so a busy Saturday literally has a per-guest software cost. When someone asks "how many covers did we do?", they mean how many guests were actually fed, not how many reservations were booked.