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Meez is mise-en-place: your set up, your station prep, your assembled ingredients and, to some extent, your state of mind. A la minute is made-to-order from start to finish. Orderl, when yelled at a cook means 'Make initial preparations' such as searing, half-cooking, setting up for finishing. Fire! means 'Finish cooking' and get ready for 'pick up'. Food ready to be picked up is put in the window or en la ventana - also called the pass, the slide or the shelf. The 'slide' refers to the slotted rack where dupes or tickets containing orders hang. So one could say, 'What orders do I have hanging?' and the reply could be, 'You got two steak' on order for the deuce on five, three soles are fired.' A cook might ask for an all-day, a total number of a particular item both ordered and fired, with temperatures, meaning degrees of doneness. And on the fly means Rushl

A wipe means just what it sounds like: a last-minute plate-cleaning. Marijuana or mota or chronic is chopped parsley. Jiz is any reduced liquid, like demiglace. When one adds whole butter to jiz, one is mounting, as in monter-au-beurre. Cook well-done translates to 'Burn it!' or 'Murder it!' or 'Kill it!' When one finds oneself waiting too long for a well-done steak to finish cooking, and it's holding up the rest of the order, one can suggest throwing it in the jukebox, or giving it a little radar love in the micro or microwave.

The latex surgical gloves we rarely wear are anal research gloves, and one usually puts them on with some theatrical flourish, snapping and grinning menacingly, accompanied by suggestions to 'Turn left and cough' or 'Grab your ankles, 'cause here comes papi chulo'. Those paper toques are coffee filters or clown hats, the checked pants we all wear, simply checks, our jackets and aprons, whites.

When the boss arrives, it's 'Elvis is in the building' or 'Pssst, desastre es aqui! And the usual nicknames apply to any and all: cooks, waiters, busboys and runners alike. Crude irony abounds. Cachundo, meaning 'piece of ass', might be applied to a particularly homely runner. Caliman, meaning 'strong man', is reserved for a weak cook, Rayo, or 'flash' to a slowpoke;Baboso, or 'drooling idiot' to, well, any drooling idiot. Any blond, well-scrubbed waiter can become 'Opie', 'Richie Cunningham' or 'Doogie Howser Motherfucker'. Stocky busboy?Sounds like Burro to me. When referring to themselves collectively, my Mexican carnales like La Raza or La M (pronouncedla emaayy), or La Mafia. Externs from culinary school, working for free as a 'learning experience' - which by itself translates to 'lots of work and no money' - are quickly tagged as FNG (Fucking New Guy), or Mel for mal carne (bad meat). Army, short for 'army cook', or the classic but elegant shoe, short for 'shoemaker', are the perennial insults for a lousy or 'slophouse' cook.

There are the usual terms of endearment, all perfectly acceptable in casual conversation between cooks: motherfucker (a compliment), cocksucker, sunofbeech, dipshit, scumbag, scum-sucker, dumb-fuck, rat-bastard, slackjaw, idiota, bruto, ani-male, asesino, mentiroso, whining little bed-wetter, turd, tortuga, strunze, salaud, salaupard, chocha podrida, pendejo, silly cunt, seso de polio, spazz, goofball, bucket-head, chucha, papi-chulo, sweet-cheeks, cupcakes, love-chunks, culero, shit-stain, cum-gargler, and so on. Asshole, strangely, is serious, to be used only when genuinely angry, and any expression involving a person's wife/mother/girlfriend/boyfriend or family member directly(with the notable exception of motherfucker) is strictly off-limits. You may well have seen your grill man's wife jacking off motorists for spare change on West Street - but you don't talk about it. Ever.

A lot of cook talk is transplanted from the fringes of military jargon. One doesn't carry, one humps. To be set up is to be squared away. He sucks it up and endures, digs in for the rush, takes a bad hit if one station is disproportionately busy - is simply fucked or fucked in the ass when