5 European Restaurants in the PH with Names We Can Never Pronounce!

With looloo having the largest place database in the country, you’d think that we’d have a pretty solid grasp on restaurant names. If you think so, then ha! You obviously overestimate our skills. While we’re happy that there are a lot more European restaurants in the Philippines these days, we’ve not been spared from the embarrassment of pronouncing their names wrong.

These places either have names that are too fancy for us pronounce, or are just worded or spelled in ways that cause our tongues to contort into awkward yoga-esque positions.

Here are a few of our favorite #restaurantpronunciationfail moments:

Champêtre

How we first pronounced it: Cham-peh-treh
Actual pronunciation: Shawm-pet(r)

Clearly, the “kung ano ang baybay, siya ang bigkas” rule doesn’t apply to French as til this day, we’re not 100% sure how to pronounce it. The “re” part is tricky, and before you hit up Google to find out how to pronounce it, we already did it for you! (Here and here. See, they’re not even exactly the same!)

Le Coeur de France

How we first pronounced it: Leh-Koor-de-France
Actual pronunciation: Luh-Koorr (Like “sewer” but less emphasis on the w, and roll the Rs)-doo-Fronze

Here’s another French tongue-twister. And here we were thinking we were all fancy as soon as we finally figured out how to pronounce “Coeur.” Apparently the France part is pronounced “Fronze” — thought it’d be a piece of cake? Yeah, we did too.

l’entrecôte

How we first pronounced it: Le-en-tre-kot
Actual pronunciation: Lawn-truh-koot

I can only imagine the look of disgust on a French person’s face after hearing our completely butchered pronunciation of this place’s name. Fun fact: “entrecôte” means a premium cut of beef, usually used for steaks!

brotzeit

How we first pronounced: Bro-zee-ey (Yes, we tried to get fancy)
Actual pronunciation: According to our German friends, it’s “brot-zayt”

Apparently, the extent of our knowledge of the German language is only slightly above a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. Also, what’s the big deal with these places starting their names with lower-case letters?? Ha.

Willkommen

How we first pronounced it: Vil-ko-men
Actual pronunciation: Vill-koh-munn

Okay, so we got the W=V thing right, only because we’d already been shamed by how we thought Volkswagen was supposed to be pronounced (“Folks-Vagen:). But “koh-munn”?? Come on.