Why attention to detail matters in hospitality

Attention to detail matters.

Everyone makes spelling mistakes. But that's why hotels, bars and restaurants need to proofread and double-check their menus and wine lists before putting them online or printing them.

Nothing says "we are slapdash and unprofessional" like a menu dotted with spelling errors.

Like one that is being sent around right now - and was sent me by a wine professional.

The one that spells pomegranate as pomagrante; prawns as prawnes and macadamia as makadamia. It goes on. coriander is corriander.

Oh, the same list displays a total lack of knowledge of compound adjectives. So no dashes in free range pork, or hibachi charred eggplant.

This isn't a corner café, either. It is a restaurant in a major international hotel in state capital city. The F&B manager - if the hotel has one - should hang their head in shame. If someone has English as a second, or third, language, it is up to the business to help them out.  

But this property is not alone. Wine lists are often full of errors. Spelling, regions, vintages are all often wrong. Misplaced apostrophes are commonplace.

Another plague is random capitalisation without rhyme or reason.

Oh, and sending emails that contain falsehoods about former employees.

This one this morning: x x x "has gone on an antisemitic tirade".

In fact, the former employee had been protesting Israeli war crimes, which is completely different to blanket anti-semitism. The former employee could well sue about false information being spread about him.

So language matters. A lot.

Your thoughts are welcome. 

Image: Jessica Lee, Scop.io 

   

A slice of cannonbear cheese with your glass of wine?

Foreign food names can make life very difficult for monolingual Anglo Saxons - and linguistically challenged gourmets around the world. 

While just about everyone can get their head around pizza and satay; Australians (and many others) find several hard-to-pronounce (and spell) words in the kitchen and on restaurant menus. 

The experts at Top10 Meal Deliveries decided to discover if there is a correlation between mispronouncing and misspelling famous foods by analysing global search trend data from Google with help from Ahrefs.

Out of all the most commonly mispronounced foods, gnocchi (nyoh-key) is the most misspelled with 295,800 searches a month for gnocci (170,000), gnochi (118,000) and gnochhi (7,800).

Bruschetta (bru-sketta) is another commonly mispronounced food, along with kombucha, daiquiri, prosciutto, macaron, and camembert, which, believe it or not, is frequently searched for as cannonbear.

I also remember being offered some horse rubbish (horseradish) with a steak dish in Asia.

Italian foods are clearly the toughest to spell, while tzatziki, chipotle and phở all missed out on making the list. 

But at least Australians can pronounce Worcestershire sauce; a feat which is beyond most Americans.  

A link to the original data can be found here.