Almost every kitchen I have worked in for the last fifteen years has run on at least two languages at the same time. Most have run on three. In the Hana Group units I ran across six states, the ownership language was Korean, the operations language was English, and roughly two thirds of the line spoke Spanish first. At Zareen's, the founders are Pakistani American, the kitchens are stacked with Latino cooks, the front of house runs on English, and one of my strongest sous chefs on Fridays was a first-language Korean speaker who happened to have grown up in Argentina and picked up Spanish before English. That kitchen actively ran on four working languages on a Friday. My job was to make it run in one motion.
I grew up trilingual. English at school. Korean at home. Spanish on my grandfather's side of the family and later, seriously, in college and on the job. That was luck. I did not build it. What I have built is a set of practices for leading teams where more than one language is alive at the same time, and where the leader who assumes everyone will just default to English is the leader who has the worst turnover in the region.
This post is what I would tell a general manager who just inherited a kitchen where they do not speak the second working language. Or a regional director who is opening a unit in a market where the frontline demographic is going to be different from the one they grew up leading.
Why monolingual leadership fails a multilingual team
A leader who runs a multilingual team only in the operating language is losing information in three directions.
Upward, they lose visibility into what the team is actually thinking. The team is talking. The team is problem solving. The team is warning each other about a piece of equipment that is failing. The leader is standing there, thinking the shift is quiet, because they cannot hear the conversation that matters.
Sideways, they lose the ability to coach the strongest people on the line. The best line cook in the room is often the person whose English is the smallest, because they have spent their working hours cooking rather than practicing. If you cannot meet that person in their language, you cannot coach them, and you cannot promote them. So you promote the wrong person, the one who talks well in English but cooks less well, and the strongest cook watches and eventually leaves.
Downward, they lose respect. Every teammate on that line knows exactly who has bothered to learn a hundred words of their language and who has not. There is no pretending. Language is not a soft signal. It is a hard signal, delivered every shift, about who counts as inside and who does not.
Every teammate on the line already knows which language you speak and which one you do not. The only question is whether you know that they know.
The one-operating-plus rule
A well-run multilingual shift needs one shared operating language and enough active use of the working languages to keep everyone inside the shift.
The operating language is where the shared artifacts live. The schedule. The safety documentation. The written SOPs. The manager to manager written communication. In US operations that language is almost always English, both for auditability and for regulatory reasons. Setting it once and being clear about it saves a lot of confusion.
The working languages are the ones people actually think in. If your line runs on Spanish, Spanish is a working language. If your sushi bar runs on Korean, Korean is a working language. Being multilingual as a leader does not mean picking one and dropping the others. It means honoring the operating language in writing and using the working languages in the moments they carry more weight than they cost. Huddles. Coaching. Hard conversations. Safety-critical instructions. Personal check-ins.
Fig. 1 · Language belongs to the moment, not to the leader's default.
The huddle that changed a kitchen
A few months into my Zareen's tenure I was on the floor at the Palo Alto location on a Friday afternoon, watching the pre-shift huddle. The general manager, a strong operator whose first language is English, was running the huddle in English. Twelve teammates in the semicircle. Three were English-first. Seven were Spanish-first. Two were Korean-first, both back on the tandoor.
She was doing the huddle right by every book I had ever read. Clear callouts. Specific 86s. VIP tables named. The three Spanish speakers closest to her were nodding. The four in the back were watching the front of the group and pretending to nod. I could see it because I was standing behind them.
After service I asked her if she wanted feedback. She did. I said the huddle was well designed and half the room was not receiving it. She said she thought their English was fine. I said it was probably fine for a full sentence in a quiet room. It was not fine for a fast callout in a loud kitchen with a walk-in humming ten feet away.
We changed it that same night. Starting the next Friday she ran the huddle in Spanish for the callouts, since Spanish was the majority language in the room, and repeated the two or three highest stakes lines in English so the front of house was hooked in. I helped her draft the first three huddles. She was fluent enough to run them alone by week three.
Two things changed inside a month. First, kitchen ticket time on Friday dinner dropped by about a minute. Not because Spanish is faster. Because the back of the line was actually hearing the callouts and preparing before the tickets landed. Second, the two Korean-first cooks on tandoor started staying for post-shift beer, which they had never done. When a leader adjusts to the language of one part of the team, the other parts of the team notice, even if the adjustment did not directly involve them.
The three-tone rule
A multilingual leader speaks in three registers depending on the moment. I think of them as tones, not languages, because sliding smoothly between them is what real fluency looks like.
Technical tone
Short. Verb-heavy. Work-critical. In whatever language moves the ticket fastest. On my Zareen's line that meant English for shared kitchen terms, Spanish for the physical actions of prep, and sometimes Korean for a specific technique word that a chef had picked up from another chef. "Fire two salmon, hold the naan, table twelve VIP." Three nouns, three verbs, one situational tag. Done.
Coaching tone
Respectful. First name. Slower pace. In either language, usually adjusted to the person. Coaching tone is where the See-Say-Set loop happens on the line. The words are chosen not just to be understood but to be received. If the person's English is limited, English coaching lands as an audit. Their-language coaching lands as coaching.
Personal tone
Relational. Warm. Almost always in the person's first language when possible. This is the tone for asking about their kid's first day of school. For congratulating them on a birthday. For finding out that their mother is in the hospital and quietly moving their shift. Personal tone is where trust is built or lost. Speak to a Korean grandmother in English and she smiles. Speak to her in Korean and she gives you her recipe for kimchi jjigae. The kimchi jjigae is not the point. The trust is the point, and the language is the door.
Language belongs to the tone. The tone belongs to the moment. Get the tone right and the language will follow.
Translating the ten SOPs that actually run the shift
One of the fastest ways to signal to a multilingual team that you take them seriously is to translate the documents that actually run the shift into the languages the shift actually speaks. Not every document. The ten that matter. In every operation I have run these ten have looked similar:
- Line prep sheet and station mise en place list
- Allergen sheet
- Opening checklist
- Closing checklist
- Food safety and temperature log instructions
- Incident response and injury reporting card
- Fire and evacuation instructions
- Standard recipe cards for the top ten menu items
- Basic HR overview: pay, timekeeping, PTO
- Anti-harassment and reporting card
Everything else lives in the operating language. These ten get translated by a native speaker on your team, paid for the work as a project, not asked as a favor. Two rules on the translation:
- No browser translation. Translation apps mistranslate exactly the words that matter most in a kitchen, like "raw" versus "undercooked" or "shellfish allergen" versus "shellfish preference." Pay for a real translation.
- The person who translates it also proofreads live use. Wait a month. Have them come back with red pen. Translations drift the same way SOPs do. The document that was right in January will be slightly wrong by April.
Hiring for a multilingual team
The single most common hiring mistake I see across multi-unit ops is filtering for the operating language on seats that do not require it. A line cook does not need to be fluent in English to be the best line cook in the room. A shift lead does. A cashier does. A line cook does not.
The rule I use is that you screen for the language the seat actually requires. Line cook seats require functional command of the kitchen operating verbs and safety terms, in whatever language the line speaks. Not fluent English. Shift lead seats require functional command of the languages of the team they lead, which in most kitchens is the operating language plus the majority-line language. General manager seats require the operating language plus whichever additional working language runs the largest number of teammates.
Some of the best sous chefs I have ever hired had thirty English words and every knife skill in the room. Filtering them out because their spoken English was limited would have cost me those hires, and cost the operation the depth those hires brought.
Hard conversations across a language
The stakes go up in disciplinary conversations, terminations, and career conversations. In those moments, using the operating language on someone whose first language is different is a failure of respect, and it undermines the seriousness of the conversation.
My rules on hard conversations across a language:
- If you speak the person's first language even partially, use it. For the emotional beats, always. For the legal or procedural language, English is fine, but bridge back to the first language for anything that touches identity, family, or dignity.
- If you do not speak it, bring a bilingual manager or peer. Tell the employee in advance who will be in the room and why. Never surprise them with a third person.
- Never ask a coworker to translate on the spot. It is unfair to the coworker, it burns them out over time, and it undermines the seriousness of the moment. If you have to translate a termination, the translator should be a manager, not a peer.
- Always follow up in writing in the person's first language. For any serious topic. It gives them a document they can reread and share with family or counsel if they need to.
The Walmart-embedded lesson
Early in my Hana Group work I sat down with a longtime prep lead at a Walmart-embedded kiosk in the Central Valley, a woman we will call Rosa. Twelve years in the company. Never promoted past prep. Her English was limited. Her Spanish was strong. Her knife skills were the best in the region.
The conversation was about promoting her to shift lead. Her general manager had recommended it. I flew in for the meeting. I opened in Spanish. I told her what the seat required, what the training would look like, what the pay change would be. I answered her questions in Spanish. She asked good ones. She asked about scheduling. She asked about how to handle a difficult teammate she had worked with for eight years. She asked about how she would give feedback to English-first hourly staff, because she was worried her English would not be enough for the coaching part.
That last question was the one worth writing down. We built a coaching-tone script together, in Spanish, that she could adapt on the fly for the English-first teammates on her shift. Short sentences. Warm. Specific behavior plus specific next move. She practiced three of them in English before I left the room.
Six months later she was one of the strongest shift leads in the region. Not because her English got dramatically better. It did not. Because we treated her first language as the primary tool of her leadership and gave her a small English toolkit for the moments she needed it. The old approach would have kept her in prep for another decade, or lost her to a competitor who bothered to hire her in Spanish.
Three mistakes I still see
Speaking only the operating language
The leader arrives every morning in English and never opens a huddle in Spanish, never says ohaeyo hyeong to the Korean chef, never learns the word for "salt" in the language of the person who hands them the salt. The team notices. Every day. The mistake is not incompetence in the other language. The mistake is not trying.
Over-relying on one bilingual employee
Every multilingual team has one person who speaks both languages well. The tempting move is to route every cross-language interaction through them. Do not. It burns them out. It centralizes power in an hourly employee. And it teaches every other teammate that their access to the leader is always mediated. Learn to speak the second language yourself, at least in the moments that matter.
Using translation apps for the hard stuff
A translation app on your phone is fine for the noun of an ingredient. It is not fine for a coaching conversation, a disciplinary meeting, or a termination. The app will mistranslate the beat that matters. And the mediation of the phone screen turns a personal moment into an impersonal one. If you would not conduct the conversation with a printed handout, you should not conduct it with a translation app.
The point
Multilingual leadership is not a bonus skill. In American hospitality it is the actual job. Every kitchen I know runs on more than one first language, and the leader who assumes everyone will default to English is the leader whose best cooks quietly leave.
Set one operating language for what has to be written. Translate the ten documents that actually run the shift. Huddle in the majority language and repeat the critical points. Coach in the person's first language whenever you can, and never mediate a hard conversation through a coworker. Learn twenty words in every language your team speaks and use them every day, not as performance, as practice.
The team already knows which language you speak and which one you do not. The question is what you do with what they know. In fifteen years of leading trilingual shifts, I have never regretted stretching further into someone else's language. Not once. I have regretted every time I did not.