–at the Jolly Roger in Oceanside, I noted a couple of items with funny names: Avocado and Friends (nothing wrong with it, just cutesy);
and an appetizer called Shrimp n’ Shrooms (I couldn’t help thinking of the non-food definition of 'shrooms).
–and at Rancho El Nopal in San Diego’s State Historic Park, they’ve got an item listed under Chimichangas called…Chingalingas. (Um, isn’t the first half of that term a naughty word in Spanish?)
I always get a kick out of seeing “Happy Family” in Chinese restaurants. I haven’t ordered it and don’t even know what you get but wouldn’t it be nice if you could just order a happy family from a menu?
I’ve occasionally noticed silly respellings of menu words. For instance, Hamburger Hamlet has a section on their menu headed “Hamburgers–Well-done, meejum, or rare”. And the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe inexplicably drops the “e” from the word “More”, as in “Seafood Platter – A feast for two or Mor”.
Ooh, I hope they do – I came across one in the Czech Republic that was classic, but I’ll have to check my travel diaries so I can reproduce it properly. For now, here are a couple of items from my favorite restaurant in Barcelona.
There’s a Chinese place near my office that serves “little juicy buns.”
Also, at a Thai spot in midtown that my best friend and I frequent, one of the desserts is ice cream with “jack fruit.” This is, of course, an actual fruit, but we giggle every single time.
“Hey Patty, try the jack fruit.” “Oh, gee, I dunno…”
Ah, here it is. I had to abridge it slightly because Czechs give you funny looks if you stand around in the town square copying menus for hours on end, but otherwise I reproduce it faithfully.
MEALS TO BE FOUND HERE
Hors d’oevre
Drowned-men (sausages) from pickled water fished out
Ham roulade with horseradish mousse filled
What the Chef de Cuisine has Down to a Fine Art
Pork to noodles cut and in Chinese art prepared
Potato pie filled untraditionally
Slant-eyed chicken of Mr. “Kung Pao”
Devil’s cheese blending
Headsman’s stroke (prepared by our chef only)
Chef’s Specialities
Whole pork knuckle in the art available in this restaurant only
Three Meats Smacker
Marinated pork cutlet in potato pie concealed
Hawai chicke
Several Petitenesses for Big Eaters
Gargantua’s Sword
Bottomless Plate for Starvelings
Several Chinese restaurants I’ve been to sell “Strange Flavored Chicken”. It must be a translation from the Chinese, because it’s not appetizing in English.
I ALWAYS see the food “Hunan Beef” on Chinese food menus…every time I see it, I read it too fast and read it as “HUMAN BEEF”, and then I quickly look for something that I would really eat…
there was an authentic (run by japanese folks) japanese resturaunt in little tokyo, LA that i loved to eat at. one of the questionable tranlations for an item was “Steam Thing”. my friends and i would invariably find this a huge source of amusement, usually after 5-6 sapporos and saki. one time we even broke out into song about our favorite menu food.
“Steam Thing, I think I love you!
But I want to know fo’ sure,
Uh… come on, an’ a’ sock it to me!
I love you!”
I’ll type up the story of “The X Burger” at lunch when i have more time.
I spent about a year in Brazil. I had to learn Portuguese on the fly to get around, but I did okay. It?s kinda like Spanish and French, with similar verbs and stuff, so I had some experience. They claim that they have no ?K? or ?X? (pronounced ?cah? and ?sheese?) in their alphabet, but that doesn?t seem to stop them from using them as often as they can. Anyway, one day this guy from New York and I were cruisin? around Sao Paulo. We stopped in a little cafe for lunch and perused the menu. We saw ?Hamburger, Hamburger Especial, Deluxe Hamburger and X Burger?.
Humm… I have a pretty good idea what a hamburger is, and can speculate what a ?Special and Deluxe? version of the same might be. Images of tasty topping danced through my head. Swank, thought I, having 3 hierarchy of burger to choose from. That ?Deluxe? must be pretty top o? the line! But wait! What?s this? An ?X? Burger. This must really be the End-All! This is so very extra special they can?t even describe it!
I call the waiter over, and quiz him on the levels of trim available on the various burgers. He gets a little tired of us gringos pretty quick and it was going downhill fast shortly after the ?Especial?. So I ask him finally, in my best Portuguese, ?So, what is the ?X? burger??
He looks at me with the disdain I previously thought could only be mustered by a Frenchman, and says, ?What, you never heard of a ?Sheese-Burger??
As a tip, I left him a note saying his worldview would improve if he would only accept the fact that the Airplane and Levi?s were not Brazilian inventions.
Badly translated menus, menu typos, weird foods… I’ve seen 'em all, baby!
There’s an actual dish on some Chinese restaurant menus called Bum Bum Chicken. I’m pretty sure it’s not just chicken butt; however, I remember seeing it in L.A. once, and my sibs, our friends, and I just laughed ourselves silly over that one!
Then there was the time last year when my brother and I were out with a bunch of his friends’ friends at a local Chinese restaurant. My brother and I were perusing the menu, and came across an interestingly-named item: Senior Fried Eice. Hmm… as opposed to “Junior Fried Rice”, one assumes?
We looked a little fuirther into the menu and saw a really hilarious typo: Deep Dried Chicken Wings. Funny thing was, they had it spelled correctly on the mini-menu: my brother then made a joke about how if you ordered the dish from one menu, you’d get deep fried chciken wings. But if you ordered it from the other menu, you’d get super-dry chicken wings.
I’m sure there’s more, but those are the three things that stick out in my memory.
