Culinary confessions

Marcus Gregs, executive chef at the Movenpick Bur Dubai, has seen a great deal during his 16 years in the industry. Here he shares his true-life tales of the kitchen English is the accepted business language in every hotel around the world.

However, the linguistic abilities of our colleagues can often lead to some rather humorous misunderstandings.

English may be widely taught, people aren't usually taught to understand the different regional accents or colloquialisms at school.

As a result, when people are confronted by either of these in a conversation... well, let's just say that Manuel from Fawlty Towers could be a UN translator compared to some I have witnessed in the six different countries I've had the pleasure of working in during the course of my career.

When I was 22 years old, I had just moved to London and, on my first day at work, my sous chef asked me to finely dice five kilos of red peppers, which I duly did.

Not until he put them into petite ratatouille did the sous chef realise I had actually diced five kilos of red chillies.

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You see, in Australia, peppers are chillies and capsicums are bell peppers - just one of example of how, even though we share a common language, we have different names for things, making it extremely easy to misunderstand each other.

When you throw in a completely different mother tongue, the situation becomes even more complicated.

I worked in Amsterdam for a time and, on my first day as executive sous chef, I discovered I had to complete all my paperwork in Dutch.

The market list, which even in a new property shouldn't have taken me longer than a few minutes, took me four hours.

I walked around the fridges for ages trying to figure out what 'kip' and 'sinaasappelsap' were (chicken and orange juice respectively, as it turned out).
 

I also ran into trouble when I asked for a yellow cutting board. 'Yellow' was fine, 'board' was no problem, however the word ‘cutting' combined with my Aussie accent made it sound like a Dutch swear word. We decided that in future ‘chopping board' would be a safer option.

Causing trouble

When I was in the UK 10 years ago,other properties in a hotel chain would often send their staff to London to learn English on the job - a kind of cross-training in language and culture, if you like.

Four sous chefs from Eastern European properties were sent to us in order to improve their English and at the time, the only words they knew were 'Coca Cola'.

Every morning, the entire kitchen team would shake these guys' hands and, with a big smile on their faces, say something rather x-rated.

Naturally, these four blokes then ended up repeating these inappropriate phrases to unsuspecting waitresses - and were usually rewarded with a slap to the face.

Ultimately though, while these linguistic pitfalls may be a source of some amusement, the moral of this story is that next time one of your team misunderstands something, it is important to remember it's not their fault.

Having patience to help them learn will make kitchen life a lot easier - and in the meantime, hopefully it will give you something to chuckle about!