After trailing at restaurant only twice, I had quickly come to realize the importance of knowing Spanish. Because, as you probably already know, almost all restaurants employ a high number of Spanish speaking immigrants to do the grunt work. And if you want them to do something for you, they will more likely get it done if you ask for it in their language. And those guys can get shit done. Only if they can understand what your gringo ass is saying, though. Unfortunately, I don’t know any Spanish. I took a few years in high school and what I knew was pushed out by being forced to take Italian in college and then attempting to relearn French recently. Pretty much what I remember is “no habla Español”, “gracias”, “chulo”, “pinga”, “burracho” and “Sabado Gigante”. Pretty much useless in a kitchen. Well, useless for now, anyway - some of those words may come in handy one day.

I want to learn French cooking. I know that a very large portion of New York’s high end restaurants are run by French executive chefs. And almost all culinary terms are French. So I was recently thinking that taking an intensive French class might be a smart move. Now I think I’m gonna scrap that idea and instead go download some Spanish lessons off of the information superhighway.