Funny Chinese Dishes: Dead Man?s Coffin, Wild Speculation Beef Salamander and More

I did a lot of thinking over the last week.

All this was sparked off by the long comment that Dyn made which I made it into a blog post called Why Do Whites Accept Japanese and Thai Cuisine Over Other Cuisine. I posted it because it was controversial and thought our readers would love to read of it. However, little did I expect that Dyn’s notes sparked off a series of very long, thought provoking comments from other readers.

That got me thinking over a few comments made regarding bad translations in Chinese Menu that puts off diners who are not familiar with the cuisine. So I did some more research on the internet and in one discussion forum, there was a discussion how a western menu differs from a Chinese one.

Menu from The Cannery, Vancouver

In western menu, the dishes often describes the ingredients and the way it is prepared.

Menu from Sunway Restaurant, Richmond

On the other hand, with Chinese dishes, you will not always be able to picture the dish if you are not familiar with it. Traditionally, many Chinese dishes have a 4-word (syllable) names and some of the names have no relevance to the dish. Sometimes they even sound poetic when spoken.

Anyway, Suanne and I thought that over the weekend we just go and check out two funny sounding menu items that we know of. These are from our past restaurant visits that our readers had pointed out which we did not realize. The plan was just to go into these restaurants and order just this ONE item and do a review of them.

Suanne was kind of “mm hoe yee see” going in and ordering one item for the two of us. Taking pictures in a restaurant already catches attention but going in and ordering ONE specific dish, taking pictures and then leave quickly sure got the attention of the restaurant. But that is what we did.

Here is what we tried:

Anyone has any idea why this is called the Dead Man’s Coffin? I can only guess it is because it is … More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Funny Chinese Dishes: Dead Man’s Coffin, Wild Speculation Beef Salamander and More (788 words)

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Post tags: Chinese, Restaurant Review, Richmond, Taiwanese