CBS5

Liam Mayclem's chef-interview radio segments (with companion website) launch Jan. 17 on KCBS.

​Local TV host Liam Mayclem began his media career in the U.K. as a teenager working for BBC Radio. He's returning to his radio roots for "Foodie Chap," a new chef-oriented feature airing daily, short segments between 6-7 a.m. and 6-7 p.m., on KCBS (740 AM and 106.9 FM). A companion website, FoodieChap.com, launches on Monday along with Mayclem's radio spots. [Update, Jan. 17: The site FoodieChap.com is now scheduled to go live Wed., Jan. 19.]

In his reporting role as host of CBS5's Eye on the Bay, Mayclem often gets to cook with and explore the food of some great local chefs. But he found that some of the best bits happen when the cameras are off, and never make it to broadcast. Mayclem says it's those moments that have inspired his new venture.

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Carolyn Jung/Food Gal

Tim LOO-yim of The Attic.

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Nothing is more humiliating than name-checking some chef you supposedly have a deep personal bond with ― or have cooked under ― and getting his or her name wrong. There are chefs SFoodie has been writing about for years we refer to by first name rather than look the fool. So we asked summer contributor Trevor Felch ― a restaurant critic at the Claremount Colleges during the school year ― to call around, asking each chef or a member of the chef's staff to pronounce his or her name. Now we're just praying we repeated his pronunciations correctly:

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​Don't Sound Like a Tool is SFoodie's series of audio pronunciation guides to sort-of-common-but-not-obvious words we keep encountering on wine lists and menus. No more shame, no more pointing, no more godawful imitations of a language you don't speak.

The past five years have seen a proliferation of housemade salumi. New varieties and subvarieties of cured pork appear weekly, the payoff for stumbling over their names a gust of pork fat and spice. SFoodie asked Mark Pastore, co-founder of Boccalone, to read through a list of some of the commonly mispronounced types of salumi spotted at local restaurants and charcuteries.

Ann L./Yelp

'Nduja: DOO-yah. The "n" is silent.

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​Don't Sound Like a Tool is SFoodie's series of audio pronunciation guides to sort-of-common-but-not-obvious words we keep encountering on wine lists and menus. No more shame, no more pointing, no more godawful imitations of a language you don't speak.

Given America's long love affair with Italian cuisine ― from the era of baked ziti to the current decade of agnolotti dal plin ― it's surprising so many of us f$#k up the names of our favorite pastas. Here, SFoodie has picked a few of our favorite, less-than-comfortable-to-pronounce pastas to sound out (quite a few of these come from the menu at Quince, always a good place for spotting varieties you have to practice saying in your head before ordering). The goal isn't to sound Italian, just to make sure you know how to order lunch.

eekim/Flickr

When you grab a fistful of tagliatelle, skip the hard g.

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​The food world is a mispronunciation minefield, especially as dishes and ingredients from around the world become commonplace on more restaurant menus. SFoodie's "Don't Sound Like a Tool" series strives to keep you out of most trouble, but wine is where it gets complicated. With so many regions, appellations, and grape varietals, it's easy to stumble, particularly when serving or ordering a German Trockenbeerenauslese, or after a couple of bottles from Italy's Trentino-Alto Adige region.

Local wine consultant Melissa Lavrinc Smith hopes to change all that with the first and only audio app for wine pronunciation, the Enotria Guide for iPhone/iPod Touch. The cost: $2.99, available at the App Store.

At launch, there are 200 terms, initially covering France, Germany, and Italy, but with planned free updates in the future to include Spain and Austria. Some basics:

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​Don't Sound Like a Tool is SFoodie's series of audio pronunciation guides to sort-of-common-but-not-obvious words we keep encountering on wine lists and menus. No more shame, no more pointing, no more godawful imitations of a language you don't speak.

Last week, SFoodie created an audio pronunciation guide for menu words we hear mispronounced all the time. At the end of the post, we asked for suggestions from readers. And oh, did you have some. They were so good that this week, we've created a new master list incorporating readers' suggestions. Once again, all pronunciations were confirmed against Merriam-Wester. (Also, feel free to check the Don't Sound Like a Tool archives for additional guides to French cheeses and Vietnamese and Filipino dishes, among others.)

USDA/Flickr

How could we have forgotten geoduck (GOO-ee-duck)?

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​Don't Sound Like a Tool is SFoodie's series of audio pronunciation guides to sort-of-common-but-not-obvious words we keep encountering on wine lists and menus. No more shame, no more pointing, no more godawful imitations of a language you don't speak.

bokchoi&snowpea/Flickr

Confit: Pronounced konh-FEE

​It's the visual equivalent of a tongue twister: Half the Americans who know what a prix-fixe menu is don't know how to pronounce the phrase correctly. Those who know which x is pronounced and which is silent have either worked in restaurants or taken a few years of French.

A while back, I put out a Twitter call for other often-mispronounced food words. I compiled the following list from readers' suggestions, adding to it a couple of words I involuntarily screw up (alembic, offal) time and time again. All pronunciations were checked against Merriam-Webster's, with the exception of gyro. (Really? Zheero? For shame, M-W.)

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​Don't Sound Like a Tool is SFoodie's series of audio pronunciation guides to sort-of-common-but-not-obvious words we keep encountering on wine lists and menus. No more shame, no more pointing, no more godawful imitations of a language you don't speak.

SFoodie has successfully proven to ourselves that we'll taste anything ― the bitterest digestifs, the sickliest schnapps, the highest-proof rums. Call us the Andrew Zimmern of the booze world. But the thing we don't know how to do with some of these alcoholic ephemera is pronounce their names. Last week, SFoodie's cocktail guy, Lou Bustamante, demonstrated how to pronounce kinds of spirits such as aguardiente and xtabentún. This week, we set him the task of calling all his bar contacts to come up with comfortable-for-Americans-to-say pronunciations for some of the most mangled brand names appearing on bar shelves.

Hip-no-TEEK or hypnotic? We don't want to order it, we just want to know how to pronounce it.

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Take it away, Lou:

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​Don't Sound Like a Tool is SFoodie's series of audio pronunciation guides to sort-of-common-but-not-obvious words we keep encountering on wine lists and menus. No more shame, no more pointing, no more godawful imitations of a language you don't speak.

Everyone knows that any cocktail worth drinking these days contains at least one ingredient you your friends have never heard of before: an artisanal vermouth made by a a couple of biochemists in Iceland, the bartender's in-house rendition of an oyster-mushroom liqueur traditionally made by shepherds in the Lebanese hills. Don't tell us you were thinking of ordering a Jack & Ginger. 

While the best part of encountering all this arcana on bar menus is that it gives drinkers and bartenders something to talk about ― a conversation, we've found, that regularly leads to educational seminars and free sampling ― there's no way you can brag to your friends about what you've just tasted if you can't pronounce the names of the spirits you've just drunk.

The Asarya/Flickr

These glasses contain Patxaran: PAH-cher-ahn.

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Correct no more: It's Sidam-A.

​Thanks to a series of comments appearing under our latest "Don't Sound Like a Tool" audio guide, SFoodie learned of a subtle shift in the spelling of an Ethiopian coffee-growing region that has much larger political undertones.

We've been happily drinking Sidamo coffee for years, believing that the name refers to Sidamo Province in southern Ethiopia. However, it turns out that "Sidamo," a name given the province more than a century ago, is a derogatory way to refer to the Sidama people who live in the region. As this 2007 American Chronicle article describes, over the past three years Ethiopian trade groups and coffee exporters and importers have been lobbying for coffee companies to start marketing coffee from the region as "Sidama."

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