The story
The restaurant analogy first appeared in a 1985 write-up by David Aldous, where it was attributed to Jim Pitman (who additionally credits Lester Dubins).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Chinese restaurant process
Today it means: A discrete-time stochastic process, analogous to seating customers at tables in a restaurant, such that, at time n, the n customers have been partitioned among m ≤ n tables (or blocks of a partition). It has applications in population genetics, linguistic analysis, and image recognition. Full definition →