Plátano, Plátano!

One of the perks of having friends from all over the world is that when we get together there’s never a dull moment.

We try to keep our nights-out interesting by choosing restaurants from every possible place of the world.

So far we’ve tried Russian food, Lebanese, Argentinean, Italian and our most recent choice: a Dominican place recommended by my husband, so we could experience the culinary offers of his home country.

The restaurant was located on Downtown Manhattan, and we arrived at the place twenty minutes late after having hunted around for parking spots on the area: there were none.

On the other hand, it was out of the question to arrive on time, since Latinos are know for their unpunctuality, so we couldn’t brake the tradition and arrive on schedule: impossible!!

My husband was in charge of ordering for the whole group and his recommendations were diverse and abundant (Latin Americans don’t practice the word: moderation) and C.T.’s husband was asking questions left to right:

‘What’s this?’ ‘What’s in it?’, ‘is it spicy?’; he even asked if we could provide the recipe for some of  the Dominican dishes.

Needless to say he was appreciating the food and what the ‘Dominican style’ cooking had to offer.

C.T.’s husband is from Germany and since they only have ‘wurst’ and hot ‘bier’ there, tasting black beans and sweet plantains was a blast to his palate and his stomach.

The dish that most caught his attention was plantains. Dominicans eat it mature or green, fried or sautéed, pureed or sliced. Any way you want it, they serve it.

My husband, caught up on the emotion of having such an enthusiastic commensal, started saying the Spanish word for plantain out loud:
Plátano! (pride and joy on his voice)

And H.T. would repeat:

Plátano! (German smile on his face)

My dear hubby, enthusiastic as he is, tried to do a fist pump with him and offered H.T. his knuckles looking for the returning pump, but H.T. (caught up in the moment I’m sure) thought that my husband was offering him a ‘hand microphone’, so he put his face near my husband’s hand and said:

Plátano! Plátano! (Still showing the German smile on his face)

We couldn’t contain the giggles and hard on laughs for the next twenty minutes.

 We spent the rest of our dinnertime, doing several impersonifications of H.T.’s ‘plátano episode’ and trying to come up with other situations were the ‘hand microphone’ was used and one of us would shout:
Plátano!, and that would be enough to bring us back to grabbing our bellies and laughing to tears.