These are the words every restaurant conversation runs on, and the ones most likely to mean slightly different things to two people in the same meeting.
None of them is complicated. The trouble is that different systems count them differently, and a report that quietly mixes two definitions is worse than having no report at all.
Cover
A cover is one guest served in one sitting. Four people at a table for lunch is four covers, whatever they ordered and however they paid.
It is a count of servings rather than of people. The same person eating with you three times this month is three covers, and that sentence is where most of the confusion in guest reporting begins.
Watch for two local variants. Some kitchens count a cover only where food was served, so a table that drank and left is not one. Some rooms report booked covers rather than seated covers, which includes the no-shows. Both are defensible. Mixing them across two locations is not.
Turn
A turn is one complete use of a table: seated, served, cleared, reset. A table that hosts two separate parties in an evening has turned twice.
Turn time is how long that takes, measured from seating to the table being genuinely ready again — including the reset, which is the part left out of every estimate and which reappears later as a queue at the door.
Turns per table per service is the number that tells you whether the room is working. It is also the number people quietly optimise into a worse restaurant, which is a separate argument and a real one.
Seats, capacity, and covers per hour
Seats is physical: how many places you can put somebody. Capacity is what you can actually serve, which is seats constrained by the kitchen, the staffing, and the shape of the room on the night.
Covers per hour is the throughput measure, and it is worth computing because it separates a full room from a productive one.
Covers per hour = covers served ÷ hours of service Turns = covers served ÷ seats Turn time = (hours of service × 60) ÷ turns (per table, roughly) Worked, on a Tuesday dinner: 40 seats, service 17:30 to 22:30 — five hours 120 covers served covers per hour = 120 ÷ 5 = 24 turns = 120 ÷ 40 = 3
Why a cover is not a guest
This is the distinction that breaks reporting, and it breaks it silently.
Covers count servings. Guests count people. A restaurant serving forty thousand covers in a year does not have forty thousand guests — it may have a few thousand, some of whom come every week and one of whom is in tonight.
Every metric expressed per cover is therefore a metric about a seat. Spend per cover describes a serving. It does not describe what a person is worth to you over a year, and the two can point in opposite directions: the regular who spends modestly every fortnight against the anniversary table that spends heavily once and is never seen again.
Terms that travel badly between systems
These five are the ones that break when two sites report upward into the same spreadsheet.
- Party size versus cover count. A booking for four where three arrive is a party size of four and three covers. Systems disagree about which they store, and some store only one.
- No-show. Some platforms mark it automatically after a set delay, some require a manager, and some sites never mark it at all. A no-show rate is only comparable within one policy.
- Walk-in. Sometimes a booking type, sometimes a reservation created at the door, sometimes not recorded as anything. This one quietly distorts every acquisition-source report you will ever run.
- Cancellation versus no-show. A cancellation is information. A no-show is a cost. Systems that collapse both into one status are hiding the number you needed.
- Covers versus checks. One check can carry several covers, which is exactly why average check and average cover are different numbers.
Why the vocabulary is worth policing
None of this matters in one restaurant where the same person counts everything and knows what they meant.
It matters the moment two sites report upward and somebody adds the numbers together. At that point a definition that differs by site is not a semantic quibble, it is a wrong figure being presented to an owner with real confidence.
The fix is unglamorous: write down which definition your group uses for each of the words above, keep it next to your definition of a regular, and make new sites adopt it before they have time to invent their own.