Hospitality Industry
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50 free Hospitality Industry trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Hospitality is one of the oldest trades there is. Long before hotel chains and tasting menus, travellers relied on monks, innkeepers and strangers bound by sacred duty to take them in, and much of the vocabulary still heard at the front desk and in the kitchen comes straight from that past. This quiz covers the whole industry: the jargon of hotels and restaurants, the ranks of a professional kitchen, the founders behind famous hotels and fast-food chains, the customs that greet a guest around the world, and the books, films and TV shows set behind the swing doors. It is written for hospitality students, hotel and restaurant teams looking for a staff quiz, and anyone curious about where the language of a great night out comes from. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which tyre company launched a restaurant and hotel guide in 1900 to get motorists driving more?
Michelin
Michelin gave away nearly 35,000 copies of its first guide, hoping more driving would wear out more tyres. Its stars for superior restaurants followed in 1926.
Q 02Which tropical fruit, once so costly that it signalled great wealth, became an architectural symbol of hospitality?
Pineapple
Pineapple was so expensive to import or raise in hothouses that hosts put one on show at dinner parties, reusing it until it rotted. Carved versions then became a decorative sign of welcome.
Q 03Which giant dog breed did monks at an Alpine travellers' hospice keep to rescue people lost in the snow?
St. Bernard
St. Bernard dogs are named after the hospice on the Great St Bernard Pass, which acquired its first dogs between 1660 and 1670. The last recorded Alpine rescue by one was in 1955.
Q 04Which serving method did Yoshiaki Shiraishi bring to his sushi restaurant after watching beer bottles at a brewery?
Conveyor belt
Conveyor belt sushi was Shiraishi's answer to a staffing problem in his small restaurant. After five years of development he opened the first in 1958 and grew it to as many as 250 branches.
Q 05Which fast-food founder began by serving chicken dishes to travellers at a Shell service station in the 1930s?
Colonel Sanders
Colonel Sanders fed his first customers in his own living quarters beside the pumps in North Corbin, Kentucky. He sold the restaurant at 65 after a new interstate drew the traffic away.
Q 06What was the profession of Ellen Church, who persuaded Boeing Air Transport to hire her as the first stewardess?
Nurse
A registered nurse, Church argued that medical staff in the cabin would calm the public's fear of flying. The first stewardesses all had to be nurses, single and younger than 25.
Q 07Which bar promotion's name is often traced to US Navy slang for scheduled entertainment aboard ship in the 1910s?
Happy hour
Happy hour was what the crew of USS Arkansas called their regular evenings of boxing, wrestling, music and movies by 1913.
Q 08Which tall, pleated white hat worn by chefs shares its name with the knitted winter cap Canadians pull on?
Toque
Toque is short for toque blanche, French for 'white hat'. In the 1500s the word described a tall black hat of silk or velvet that was fashionable among Spanish nobles.
Q 09Which weekend meal did British writer Guy Beringer propose in 1895 as a more sociable alternative to Sunday dinner?
Brunch
Brunch got its name in Beringer's essay 'Brunch: A Plea' in Hunter's Weekly. Punch magazine soon described it as a Sunday meal for Saturday-night carousers.
Q 10Which number is American restaurant slang for a dish that has run out or a customer to be refused service?
86
86 has been kitchen and bar code since the 1920s or 1930s, and nobody is sure why. A leading theory makes it rhyming slang for 'nix', the old word for no.
Q 11Which chain did milkshake-mixer salesman Ray Kroc franchise after visiting two brothers' San Bernardino restaurant?
McDonald's
McDonald's intrigued Kroc because the brothers had bought eight of his mixers for one restaurant. Their Speedee system had swapped carhops and crockery for a nine-item menu in paper wrappers.
Q 12Which restaurant chain's memorabilia collection began with a guitar Eric Clapton wanted hung over his regular seat?
Hard Rock Cafe
Hard Rock Cafe was opened in London in 1971 by two Americans, and Clapton was a regular. Pete Townshend of The Who then sent a guitar of his own, and the collection grew from there.
Q 13Which French chef organised restaurant kitchens into the brigade system and created Peach Melba at London's Savoy?
Q 21Which kitchen rank takes orders straight from the head of the brigade and stands in whenever that boss is not present?
Sous-chef
Sous-chef literally means 'under-chief', the deputy in the brigade system. Next in line come the chefs de partie, who each manage a single station of the kitchen.
Q 22Which French menu phrase means ordering individually priced dishes, the opposite of a set table d'hôte meal?
À la carte
À la carte literally means 'at the card' and was borrowed into English in the early 1800s. That was before the word 'menu' itself arrived, in the 1830s.
Q 23Which fee do restaurants charge guests who bring their own wine, a practice common where liquor licences are scarce?
Corkage
Auguste Escoffier
Auguste Escoffier drew on his own army service to give every cook a rank and a station. He named the peach dessert for Australian singer Nellie Melba, and Melba toast followed.
Q 14Which man, known as the king of hoteliers and hotelier to kings, gave English an adjective for showy luxury?
César Ritz
César Ritz was sacked as an apprentice wine waiter and told he had no flair for the hotel business. The adjective 'ritzy' comes from his name and his luxury hotels.
Q 15Which travel pioneer began in 1841 with a rail excursion from Leicester to Loughborough for temperance campaigners?
Thomas Cook
Thomas Cook, a cabinet-maker turned Baptist preacher, took 485 members of the Leicester Temperance Society on that first trip. The idea came to him on a 15-mile walk to a meeting.
Q 16Which restaurateur is credited with America's first restaurant chain, built along the Santa Fe Railway from the 1870s?
Fred Harvey
Fred Harvey staffed his dining rooms with 'Harvey Girls', waitresses who lived under curfew in supervised housing next door. Their story became a 1946 film musical.
Q 17Which chain, founded in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921, is generally credited as the world's first fast-food hamburger chain?
White Castle
White Castle began with just $700 put up by a cook and an insurance man. Imitators copied it so closely that the first, also in Wichita, called itself Little Kastle.
Q 18Which all-inclusive holiday company began in 1950 as a colony of tents on Mallorca set up by Gérard Blitz?
Club Med
Club Med, short for Club Méditerranée, slipped from its founder's hands when he went bankrupt in 1953. His tent supplier, Gilbert Trigano, was the main creditor and took control.
Q 19Which chef's 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential gave an unfiltered look at life inside high-end restaurant kitchens?
Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain's book grew out of a New Yorker essay that his mother, a newspaper copy editor, passed along through a colleague. It launched his media career.
Q 20Which wine job's title is thought to come from an old word for a pack-animal driver?
Sommelier
Sommelier was the Middle French title of a court official in charge of transporting supplies, in the days when pack animals did the hauling. Where a restaurant has none, the head waiter usually steps in.
Corkage, or a corking fee, usually applies only to bottles of wine. The initials BYOB began in the 1920s as 'bring your own booze' and settled on 'bottle' in the 1950s.
Q 24Which bite-sized starter is sent out free by the chef, never ordered from the menu, before a restaurant meal begins?
Amuse-bouche
Amuse-bouche literally means 'mouth amuser', and it is usually just one or two bites. The chef alone chooses it, and everyone at the table gets one free of charge.
Q 25Which nation's style of serving dinner course by course displaced the French custom of laying every dish out at once?
Russian
Russian service reached France in 1810, when ambassador Alexander Kurakin gave dinners that way at his residence in Clichy. Hot food no longer sat cooling on the table as a showpiece.
Q 26Which hotel term means the full published price of a room, the amount a guest pays by walking in off the street?
Rack rate
Rack rate is higher than the price most travel agents can book for their clients. Car rental firms use the same term for what a customer pays with no booking.
Q 27Which hotel metric, tracked across markets in STR's STAR report, measures room takings against the rooms on offer?
RevPAR
RevPAR stands for revenue per available room. A sister measure, GOPPAR, does the same sum with gross operating profit to show how the whole property is performing.
Q 28Which French kitchen phrase describes having every ingredient chopped, measured and laid out before service begins?
Mise en place
Mise en place means 'putting into place', and covers everything a cook will need for the dishes expected during a shift. The idea has since been borrowed by classrooms and hospitals.
Q 29Which industry invented yield management, the demand-based pricing that hotels later adopted for their room rates?
Airlines
Airlines built the system in response to US deregulation, and American Airlines chief Robert Crandall gave it its name. It quickly spread to hotels, car rental firms and cruise lines.
Q 30Which word for a place to stay was coined in 1925 at the Milestone in San Luis Obispo, California?
Motel
Motel was born because owner Arthur Heineman could not fit 'Milestone Motor Hotel' on his rooftop sign, so he ran two words together. He never managed to trademark the result.