Sometimes it feels like you need a dictionary to read a menu in San Francisco. Even people who know food pretty well often have to ask the server to explain listed ingredients. So I was interested when SFGate posted this article of 100 commonly mispronounced food words. The guide includes a definition of each food, a phonetic pronunciation, and even an audio recording of each word. There were some surprising inclusions, like croissant, caramel, and arugula. But this compilation – originally run in the San Antonio Express News – seems to take the whole nation into account, rather than just areas of the US that enjoy eating hard to pronounce, totally obscure foods like we do in the Bay Area.
While the list is pretty elementary (wait, some people are pronouncing "tortilla" wrong?), a few of the 100 are terms I've heard people in SF (myself included) say wrong: prix fixe (pree-feeks), pasty (PAHS-tee), tagliatelle (tah-lyah-TEH-leh), worcestershire (WOOS-ter-sheer) are some common trouble words. So before you roll your eyes and judge the rest of America, check out this guide and make sure you're ordering correctly. You might be surprised to find a few words you've been saying wrong all this time.
Are there any foods you've had a hard time pronouncing? What words do you wish were on this list?
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