It means ‘Total’.

If you are working as a linecook, you are often planning/preparing more than one of a particular dish at a time. In the rush, things can get a little confusing sometimes.

There are generally 2 ways to receive orders in a kitchen. Either you have a ticket machine on your station, in which case you are responsible for collecting and managing your own orders, or there is someone collecting the orders for the entire kitchen and relaying them to you verbally.

The phrase ‘all day’ is more commonly used when there is someone relaying orders to you. See, as tickets come in, whoever reads them yells out the order to each cook, and receives a response.

For instance, if you get a ticket with some items that come off your garde manger station, you yell at the cold cook:

“Fire!… Gems!… Tartare!… Two Oysters!”

And that cook better yell back.

“Gems! Tartare! Two oysters!”

Although, sometimes, if it’s busy, a cook might get away with just saying “Heard!” or some other shorter phrase.

Communication is important here. Call and response helps to reduce error.

But sometimes you get distracted, or an order gets garbled or confused, so it’s still helpful to occasionally reference your personal accounting against the actual tickets.

So let’s say you’re about to work on shucking some oysters. You heard that call for two oysters, and two earlier calls for oysters. So, in your head, you have a count of four oysters total, or ‘four oysters all day’.

Oysters are messy to shuck fresh, so you’re probably going to set some time aside to just do all four orders. That way you can do all of the orders and only set up and clean up once. This consolidation of time can save you crucial seconds. So you line up some plates with ice and count out your oysters to line up in your shucking towel. Now, it’s not necessary by any means, but if you have any doubt whatsoever about how many orders of oysters you have on your board, it’s a good idea to call out something like ‘Oysters all day!?’. Whoever is watching over the tickets knows then to count every order of oysters that they see on their ticket rail, and relay that number back to you. Then you can confidently collect the total number of oysters you will need for your orders.

If the call comes back ‘Three all day!’, something must have been missed there, and it’s a good thing you asked. Because now you’re not wasting time on an extra order of oysters that’s just going to sit in the window.

If you get really lost, or totally slammed, you can also just call for an ‘All day’. If there isn’t a dish specified, it’s understood that you want a count for each item on your station. So the keeper of the tickets must then count each of the items on your station and relay each total.

This can get really intense actually. The ticket watcher is more commonly known in the kitchen as the ‘expediter’ or ‘expo’. It can take awhile to really get proficient at this job. Often, it’s a chef or sous chef who performs this function. There’s a lot you need to understand to function here effectively. You need to have a working relationship with both the FOH and BOH. You need to understand the menu, where each dish comes from on the line, and how long it will take to prepare, taking into consideration the current state of the kitchen and the cook responsible for the dish. When things go wrong in a busy kitchen, the expediter needs to be able to shift around the whole flow in order to make things right, and ideally, they need to do that without hurting too many feelings. Waitstaff get pissy when customers get cranky, and cooks get pissy when their flow gets messed with, or one of their dishes come back to the kitchen. Balance that emotional puzzle against trying to maintain a running list of orders for an entire kitchen, and things can get interesting. Bad expediting can bring the whole restaurant down.