Ask before ordering: Unsuspecting diners get more than they expected
A friend passed along a story about her daughter, Gayle, visiting a tapas restaurant in Seville, Spain, where she and some friends are on a study-abroad program.
One of the little dishes they ordered was huevas, which they thought was a misspelling of huevos, which means eggs in proper Spanish.
(Eggs are a popular tapas item, although they’re usually served as a tortilla – which, to American eyes, is a frittata, not a bread. It does get confusing.)
Anyway, the huevas came and the girls began eating. The eggs tasted like fish.
“As the small pieces crumbled in my mouth,” Gayle wrote to her mom, “I thought, ‘This is really a strange dish.’” Only after everyone had eaten some did one of the girls suggest the huevas might have been fish eggs.
When the waiter said, “No, no, not fish eggs,” they were quite relieved – until he added, “Fish ovaries!”
The Spanish dictionaries I checked say huevas does mean roe or fish eggs, but the waiter might have been using a more colloquial definition.
Either way, the girls didn’t get what they thought they were ordering.
When it comes to food, that’s rarely a good thing.
If there’s a lesson in their story – other than not ordering eggs in bars – it’s that asking questions when you’re not sure about the menu is always the best policy.
Restaurants are constantly bringing diners new ingredients, new techniques and new versions of familiar dishes. At the same time, menus are using more and more foreign food words without a hint of their meaning. And there’s virtually no way to keep up with it all unless you’re a Food Network or food magazine addict.
Yet, for fear of looking unsophisticated, many diners are reluctant to ask the server to describe an unfamiliar ingredient or explain how a dish is prepared.
They’re afraid they’re the only one at the table who has never tasted pork belly or sunchokes or dinosaur kale. They think everyone else knows what confit and gremolata and gastrique are.
Here’s the secret: Nine out of 10 people don’t. And furthermore, that’s just fine.
Asking questions about the menu is not only fun and empowering, it’s your best defense against a meal you won’t enjoy.
If you aren’t familiar with aioli, for example, asking your waiter to describe it will save your sandwich from ruin if you hate mayonnaise.
Learning that pork belly is a chunk of unsliced bacon that’s cooked gently for hours in oil or broth should tell you to expect a very fatty, rich piece of meat.
And learning that huevas are fish ovaries would let you order something – anything – else.