Now that mise-en-place and microplane have become household vocabulary, I have been wondering if another restaurant commonplace — family meal — was as widely understood. It’s that spread you might have seen in a food magazine or a well-known chef’s cookbook, or even walked in on — stopping by a restaurant off hours in the afternoon — when all the wait staff are sitting down in the dining room with their ironed shirts neatly hung on their chair backs, eating in their white undershirts in case the sauce splatters. They are tasting wine, being briefed on the reservation book for that night, folding napkins.

Some places do a fine job of it — complex and varied and interesting family meals — but I’m willing to put $100 down that if you come in through the loading dock of any large restaurant, hotel kitchen, catering hall or banquet facility across America, you will find a tray of baked chicken legs, a hotel pan of baked rice (or baked pasta) and a romaine salad (not baked but may as well have been). There’ll be a crew of cooks in dirty aprons standing at their stations on the hot line while their pots come to boil, wolfing their portions of family meal out of pint containers with their fingers. There might be one guy in a hairnet sitting on an overturned milk crate — a dishwasher letting sheet pans soak in the three-bin sink. An additional $100 is yours if you don’t also find a plastic bottle of sriracha out on the counter.

Here’s a bit of Stockholm syndrome: After 30 years, my wife and co-chef, Ashley, and I have come to crave that chicken and rice. To cultivate and elevate it. To cherish and nurture it. We brown and then braise the chicken, toast and grind the rice before steaming, “chicharron” the skin, add small, tasty meatballs, julienne the lemon peel, thinly slice the shallots and at the very end soften tender spinach in the hot broth. And now we’ve put it on the menu at our restaurant, Prune: “Family Meal” Stewed Chicken and Rice. No matter what “family meal” you are putting together — the one with your actual spouse and children in a warm yellow kitchen with wood and stone and Le Creuset all around, or the one with your vitamin-D-deficient kitchen kin, left out all afternoon in buckled stainless steel pans under the fluorescents — it is every single thing you want and need it to be.