not starved yet

we normally eat our lunch with the thai cement carvers, who speak some cantonese, so lunch ordering usually goes like this;

us- what's that, (point at food) how do you say that?
thai carver, usually Joy or Suwan, "Chau Daan faan", but with special intonations our useless western ears miss...
us, to waitress- "chow dan fharn?"
waitress- "eh?", turns to Joy, "blah blah etc etc?"
Joy frowns, asks Nat or Ed something in thai, thai conference ensues, with questions back and forth in english and cantonese, something is ordered usually with many more words used to describe it.
some food arrives, perhaps what we asked for, usually with salty pig, which seems to get into every food dish.
Today I used the international sign language symbol for a big bamboo steamer with chunks of fish being cooked in it, convoluted, but ultimately successful...
Sometimes one of the waitresses will say, in reply to our terrible manglings of cantonese, "mm.fish, rice.", making us wonder if they are just taking the piss.