Do ethnic restaurants have secret menus?

[Mijin]

@Princhester

“Also, I followed your link about dog meat. I had no idea that they tortured the dogs.”
I don’t know if they torture the dogs. I do know that an entry on Wiki that says *"*Animal rights activists and others opposing dog meat consumption ** argue that the butchering process involves unimaginable cruelty" does not necessarily equate to it being anything even close to a fact that they torture the dogs.

The linked WikiPedia page mentions torture and includes many cites (although I see someone’s removed some of the more disturbing ones).
Googling around it would seems that slow, painful butchery is the norm, not the exception. Apparently there is a belief that dogs killed slowly and painfully give better quality meat and/or enhance the virility of the consumer. :eek:

[TheLoadedDog]

@Una Persson

My favourite Indian restaurant has several “off menu” dishes, that are not listed, he says, because “all Indians know that any good restaurant has them, and not many non-Indians ever order the items.” He happily lists off the items if I ask him, and it’s not really a secret. I just think it honestly never occurred to him that anyone non-Indian would want them. Which I think is crazy, because there’s very little to no difference between the general type of food and what’s on the main menu (except that more items are served “sizzling”, on a hot plate).

That goes for the local pho place I go to. One of the signature things about hardcore pho restaurants is their small menus - it makes things simple. This one is no exception, and the menu (in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese) is as follows:

Beef Pho
Chicken Pho
Special combination
Tea
Coffee
Rau Ma
Soft drinks

…and that’s it.

Same principle as what Una describes. They make a lot of other different soups - they are all pho-based, and usually represent regional varieties. The Vietnamese know what to ask for, and the Westerners don’t really care. If you’re eating pho instead of McDonald’s, then the other things are no more “exotic”. No lizards’ gizzards or anything like that; just not worth sacrificing a simple menu for, and certainly hard to put in English: you can ask, “You know that pho they have around Hue with the extra satay, but the different chilli, and the chicken is fatty? Yeah, well one of those, please.” But you can’t really put it on the menu in English. I’ve asked for off-menu things there, and I’m a big, hairy white guy. I’ve never been refused, or even gotten so much as a batted eyelid.

[VinylTurnip]

@An Gadaí

My friend always demands the menu with dog on it when we visit a Korean restaurant. He hasn’t got it, yet.

No, but I bet he’s had his food spit on a few times.

[Voyager]

@jjimm

Steamed with no sauce or spices is the way I’ve had it. Not very nice, to me. But you say you have a Hong Kong friend - ask him/her to order it. I believe the dim sum dish “five treasures” contains a roll of it, amongst other things.

She lives on the opposite coast, so next time she’s out here we will.

Do you know if the stomach is cooked whole? The way we eat it is stuffed with potatoes and sausage. We were able to get some in the Housewife’s Market in Oakland, but it was torn up. We can look in the many Chinese groceries around here if it is prepared without rips.

[MrSquishy]

If you want to try some dog, come on up.

Actually, the I think restaurant mentioned in the article is now closed (probably due to the bad publicity). But apparently there’s nothing (other than a few regulations) stopping anybody from serving dog here.

[Voyager]

I expect some restaurants have specialties which are on the menu rarely but available always with some advance notice. My Jeopardy prize was a week in a resort near Carmel, with $100 a day for food. Since we were out and doing things doing the day, this meant that we pretty much went through their menu during the week. At the end they offered us their steak specialty, not on the menu, which was very good.

That’s the only time I’ve had the opportunity to eat the entire menu of a place. (The cardboard was well seasoned. ) Even better, we live close enough so that we weren’t missing anything in the sense of restaurants we could have gone to.

[Spiff]

@WoodenTaco

Apologies for the hijack, but why is this illegal?

Well, would you think that a restaurant with a menu only for whites and another only for blacks would be breaking a few laws?

What if the black menu had higher prices, and the restaurant were run by whites? Or vice versa?

I’m sure that there would be a host of lawyers drooling over the chance to sue such a restaurant using any number of equal opportunity laws and anti-discrimination laws as a legal basis.