Chinese Menu Guide: The tastiest lesson

In my time in China truely my favorite language lesson took place after school let out in the morning and I headed out with my friends to one of the many restaurants surrounding the campus. Our campus had three gates: East, South, and West. And each gate let out on to a streetscape full of vendors and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. In our world we organized each collection of gustatory choices around these three groupings. South Gate was the first to be explored as it was nearest to our dorms and classrooms and also because the South Gate was the main entrance of the old campus of HeDa.

View down the "restaurant alley" out of the West Gate

Once the restaurant was chosen the Chinese lesson began, one look at a Chinese menu for the truly uninitiated is daunting, I have never been to China without having at least a year of Chinese under my belt. So I can only imagine what it might be like to go and not even know which was the top of the menu. But even for someone with a year of classes the majority of what is contained in the menu is out of reach. A few characters or words might stand out: egg, meat, chicken, fish, some of the directions, colors, hot or cold.

Of course these might only give a hint of what you might be ordering, maybe you might count yourself luck if you know one of the usually four characters in a dish's name. (I recall once being on a train in western China years before my life in Kaifeng and being handed a hand written menu by the waitress, at the time printed characters on a menu were a challenge but I could get what I wanted, but scribbles? Forget it! I decided that since all I could make out was the prices I would guess based on what I thought seemed like the price for an entree and what might be the cost of a side dish relative to the other prices on the menu and pointed. In the end some gentlemen who joined my table afterwards on the train decided that i had ordered the wrong thing and told the waitress to change my order, it was a fun meal.)

This series will take you through what I have learned about Chinese food and language and cooking and eating from my experiences doing all of those things. Honestly, no offence to any of my Chinese teachers, but the Chinese lessons I truly was able to excel at were at the table.