A holiday anecdote

We are sitting at a terrace table at the "Porto Vecchio" restaurant in Malcèsine, Lake Garda (Italy), enjoying our "Melanzane alla parmigiana" (or similar). The food is what we would expect from the Italians: simple and delicious; the service very friendly compared to some of the restaurants we’ve visited, where the waiters and waitresses seem bored and weary, presumably from the streams of tourists either mispronouncing the dishes or not trying to pronounce them at all and barking their orders in louder than usual German, English or French.

This particular waitress has humoured us and allowed us to practice our shaky yet well pronounced Italian on her without resorting to rolling her eyes and addressing us back in German (the default nationality of tourists in the region) or English.

We become aware of what can only be described as a "kerfuffle" emanating from the next table. An elderly lady is tutting, as only the French know how:

She regards the dessert which has recently been placed on her table.

"Non, non, ce n’est pas ça que je voulais..." she shakes her head and blusters indignantly to her elderly companion, as I eavesdrop.

In the meantime, the waitress brings us our desserts. Big has chosen "Sorbetto al limone", expecting a lemon sorbet. This turned out to be what we linguists refer to as a "faux ami". In actual fact "sorbetto", as we discover, seems to refer to a more liquid concoction – a gloopy beverage. Still, you learn something new every day – Big happily consumes the slightly unexpected dessert.

Not so our French lady. She too was expecting a lemon sorbet, but rather than learning from her experience that actually, sorbetto is not the direct equivalent of what the French would call a sorbet, she proceeds to complain to the hitherto kind and patient waitress. In French.

"Un sorbet, c’est une glace à l’eau, ce n’est pas ça," she gestures toward the apparently errant dessert as if someone had placed a fresh turd on her table. The waitress is bewildered – and rightly so. The woman had ordered a "sorbetto", she had brought her a "sorbetto". After a frustrating exchange where each party repeats their argument ad nauseam ("This is a sorbetto!", "This is not a sorbet!"), the waitress disappears off into the restaurant, gesticulating and muttering something vitriolic (which included the word "francese") to her male colleague, who then appears at the table.

After reiterating what his colleague, the waitress, had previously asserted (to no avail), finally the stalemate is broken as the male colleague offers her an alternative dessert – somewhat begrudgingly, since there was actually nothing wrong with the previous dessert. She chooses a crème caramel, which she eats with po-faced arrogance. I’m surprised she manages to get the spoon through her stiffly pursed lips...

How very unlike the French to be arrogant when it comes to food!

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*whispers* I usually blog here