Does anyone speak English here?

Yesterday morning I finally made it back to the kitchen at Pierluigi after nearly a month's absence. It was a particularly slow day, I helped Antonio make tomato sauce, chopped a few hundred cherry tomatoes and sorted the good and bad basil leaves out of a large pile. Again, I had a very simple task to do, chop tomatoes, but Antonio managed to show me how to do it better, arrange the cutting board on top of the bin that the halved tomatoes were going into and set up the bowl of whole tomatoes just to the side to reduce any un-needed extra movement. Aside from that a few interesting things did happen while I was there.

While I was chopping tomatoes one of the guys who delivers fish came in and said he had a pescone (a really big fish; pesce - fish, -one - a suffix meaning something large), sitting on ice. What he carried into the kitchen was only the tail, from the lower dorsal fin to the tip of the tail. It weighed 25 kilos, so it was probably a 300-350 pound fish. What transpired from there was interesting. The seller wanted the restaurant to by the whole thing, making his life easier not having to find another buyer, but 25 kgs of tuna would just go to waste, they only needed 10. Either the guy selling was not a very good negotiator or the guy who handles the fish at Pierluigi is just that good, but the restuarant ended up buying just the 10kgs they wanted and they guy carried the rest away.

For lunch we had a nice pasta, penne with tomato sauce al profumo di basilico (with hint of basil). Antonio put that together, the sauce was very simple, some white onions finely chopped, large canned, peeled whole tomatoes, oil olive and light salt. That simmered for about 45 minutes until the tomatoes had pretty much fallen apart, then he added a little bit of a pesto-like sauce he blended with a hand blender. To go with that Giovanni made some breaded sardines and a nice salad.

While we were eating lunch the phone rang and Lorenzo's grandmother (I think, haven't quite figured out the relationship) picked up the phone and then rather confusedly turned to the tables where we were all sitting and asked if anyone spoke English. I was the only one as Lorenzo wasn't there and the two waiters who speak English hadn't arrived yet, so I took the reservation. A little thing, but it entertained me nonetheless, Isabelle for 2 people at 8:00 last night.

When I walked back into the kitchen a spiny lobster that was crawling across the floor having escaped the tray it was sitting and fallen off the counter. Giovanni was the only other one in the kitchen, he tends to take a quick lunch and get back to work, and had his hands full filling ricotta rolls and pointed the lobster out to me as I almost stepped on it on my way into the kitchen, guess the their fish is pretty fresh.