Writing yesterday’s blog made me think of all sorts of other food stories having to do with unmet expectations and misunderstood menus. I had a restaurant in Vermont for a while, and some people, usually New Yorkers, assumed that we were all a bunch of yokels. (I can say that, being a New Yorker myself.) One day we had veal scallopine on the menu. Two young, exquisitely coiffed and manicured bleached blondes from Long Island ordered it, and then made a fuss when it arrived. I was working the front of the house that day, but their waitress held up her hand, indicating to me that she would handle it. The young women said that they had been to Italy, and that this was not veal scallopine–it had peppers, and it should have mushrooms and tomatoes. The waitress said that it was the chef’s version, whereupon the young women said that if the chef had ever ventured out of the cornfield he would know better. My waitress–who had a Master’s degree and was waiting tables to help pay for her doctorate–told them that veal scallopine simply means pieces of veal and is not the name of a specific recipe, and that furthermore the restaurant’s owner (me) had been around the world at least four times and had not, to her knowledge, ever set foot in a cornfield. And then she repeated it again–in Italian. They ate their food. In my own waitressing days, I had a customer who ordered his omelet rare. The chef gave me a funny look, but undercooked it a little. I served it, and the customer said it wasn’t rare enough. The chef tried again. After the third try, the chef took off his apron, swapped his baseball hat for a tall white toque, walked to the customer’s table, set down a plate, and broke three eggs on it with a flourish. A friend of mine who was also a travel writer wound up on a junket to Japan that was for foodies. After days of dealing with unfamiliar food and unusual delicacies, she sat down to yet another dinner and tucked into an appetizer that looked palatable–several globules of what looked like aspic with a bit of something–maybe foie gras?–in the middle. As was the pattern of that particular trip, after dinner all the writers were given a detailed description of what they had just eaten and how it was prepared. Turns out her “aspic” had been fetal seal. She begged off the next day’s lunch and went looking for a McDonald’s. –Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer