Numbers Becoming Words

“Eighty-six strombolis!”

If you were new on the job and didn’t know anything about the restaurant business, would you know what this meant?

I heard this (or something like this) at my first restaurant job, at a pizza place inside a mall. I was tasked with serving customers slices of pizza, calzones, and stromboli. If you’ve never had stromboli, think of it as a piece of pizza rolled up inside of itself:

So, wait. There aren’t 86 of them. In fact, we just sold our last one! What’s going on?

Over time, I allowed context to be my guide, and I began to understand that this was code for “we’re out of something.” I’m not sure I ever asked a single human what this meant; I was probably terrified of looking stupid, a common symptom of a scarcity mindset.

BrianAlfred1983

, my cooking brother from another mother, had a very similar experience early on. Here’s Brian:

I would hear the line cooks yell out, “86 rice, 86 mash, 86 prawn cock, (Prawn Cocktail). I came to find out that to “86” something, meant to tempor…