Readback
Repeating a full instruction back to the person who gave it, clause for clause, and getting their explicit confirmation, before acting on it — not a summary, the whole thing, checked.
The practice is old and well-tested well beyond restaurants: the FAA's Aeronautical Information Manual has pilots read back an altitude, vector, or runway assignment as mutual verification with air traffic control, and the Joint Commission requires a telephoned medical order be written down, read back in full, and confirmed before anyone acts on it.
A caller orders “buffalo wings, twelve, with a side of ranch.” Without a readback, “ranch” quietly becomes “blue cheese” somewhere in the pipeline and reaches the kitchen wrong. With one, the caller hears the order confirmed back and catches the slip in the few seconds before it's ever sent.
The most common mix-up is treating any confirmation-shaped sentence as a readback. A summary — “a dozen wings and fries, anything else?” — compresses the order down to whatever felt worth repeating, which is exactly where a detail quietly drops out. A genuine readback omits nothing: every item, every modifier, the total.
Before an order is sent anywhere, Dohos reads the whole reviewed order back and treats anything short of an explicit yes to that exact version as not yet confirmed, covered in full on Orders.
BACK TO THE FULL GLOSSARY · OR THE WORKED GUIDES
Open the line.
Tell us about your restaurant. We load your menu, you place a call, and you hear it answered yourself.