Our Dishwasher ...

Monday is usually the slowest day of the week for us at Hot Pot Heaven (so if you ever want to beat the crowd Monday would be the best day to visit us :) That, or you can also call in to make a reservation). My nephew, who is working in the front, is on vacation today so the HPH team had to work extra hard today to keep the customers happy.
 Because it was a little slow, the kitchen staff didn't have much to do so we decided to shine everything in the kitchen. From the fridges to the legs of our working tables - all shined. That's what we do when we are a little slow - we clean and I am just super happy that everyone in our kitchen like to clean. One of the person who like to clean is our dishwasher, Mrs. Tuyết. Although we have a dish washing machine, Mrs. Tuyết always rinses and inspects each dishes before putting it in the washer. Our machine maintenance person claimed, "This is the cleanest dishwasher I have ever seen" .
  Our HPH team calls Mrs. Tuyết - "Cô Tuyết" which means, Aunt Tuyết. Aunt Tuyết  just came from Vietnam about 11 months ago.  Her first job is here, at Hot Pot Heaven and she is still with us. I am so glad I found her because she is a CLEAN FREAK :) and has a great memory. She cleans everything in sight and remembers what items we need to order. The only thing Aunt Tuyet feels uncomfortable about is her English skill. She can’t speak at all. Thus, she is happy in the back working with other Vietnamese-speaking people. I happy that she is comfortable and her lack of English skill actually bring a lot of entertainment and creativity to our staff.

We made up names of a few vegetables that Cô Tuyết doesn't know the Vietnamese names for them (we don't have them in Vietnam) to help her remember them better and these names are sometimes just simply hilarious. For example, we call bok choi - "cải đít mập" which means "fat butt veggie" :)

What do you think of our name? "cải đít mập" :)

Another vegetable that we made up name for is spinach - we called it "cải dập" = "easily bruised veggie".

Cô Tuyết has now learned almost all our items in English but we still use the names we have created for these  items as it always makes us laugh. She also now knows how to say "rice" and all the names of our broths. I am very proud of her and very glad to have her on the team. Cám ơn cô Tuyết :)

Oh, another thing that made me super happy today is that I just discovered that I can take the stove range apart and clean them! yay!  My uncle, chú Tình, who used to own a restaurant, showed me today. We only cleaned it a bit as I learned about it a little late. I am looking forward to the weekend to clean this fire range! Cám ơn Chú Tình :)