Overseas Chinese Web Guide

Tag: restaurant

  • 鲍汁扣辽参

    Thank goodness for the photo because I could not read the Chinese and the English was utterly incomprehensible. At first, I thought the dish was named after a Chinese senator named Bao Zhikou. It could be possible, much like how Dongpo Pork 东坡肉 bears the name of 苏东坡.

    From the photo, the pièce de résistance appears to be sea cucumber and Google Translate confirms my suspicions with an obtuse translation of Bao Zhi buckle Sea Cucumber.

    The better translation will interpret 鲍 as abalone and 汁 as sauce. As for 扣, Google Translate offers the following possibilities. As a noun, 扣 may mean button, discount, knot or ouch. In this context, none of these are correct. As a verb, Google Translate offers buckle, button, deduct, button up, pull, detain, fasten, arrest, place, press, or take into custody. These are all wrong as well. My best guess is that 扣辽参 means steamed sea cucumber because 梅菜扣肉, which is a favorite dish, is preserved vegetables with steamed pork. So, my translation would be Sea Cucumber in Abalone Sauce.

    So, where does distant senate come from? Well, 辽 could mean distant or faraway as an adjective. Senate, according to Google, is 参议院, so there you have it.

    As for the related menu items, 清炖辽参 could be translated to Sea Cucumber is Clear Broth. I can see how “boils in its own broth without soy sauce” would be one way to translate clear broth. Google translates 金米烩辽参 to Golden Rice Braised Sea Cucumber. Of course, 金米 literally means Golden Rice; however, a closer translation may be available. I just haven’t found it yet. I am 100% sure that Bao Zhikou and Jin Mihui do not refer to competing senators with dishes named after them.

  • 木瓜炖雪蛤

    Not sure how 木瓜炖雪蛤 ended up as The Chinese Flowering Quince Cooks the Snow Clam Synopsis. As far as I know, 木瓜 is papaya, not the Chinese Flowering Quince. I can see how 雪 which means snow and 蛤 which means clam ended up together as snow clam, but where did synopsis come from?

    Google Translate says 木瓜炖雪蛤 means Papaya Stew Hasma. I agree with the Papaya and Stew part, but I have never heard of Hasma. Wikipedia reports that Hasma is a Chinese dessert ingredient made from the dried fallopian tubes of true frogs. Ugh, on second thought, Snow Clam Synopsis sounds perfectly delicious. Talk about a missed translation. Big difference between clams and frog fallopian tubes.

    As for the 木瓜, I had to reverse search the Chinese Quince on Wikipedia and it turns out that Chinese Quinces and Papayas are both referred to as 木瓜. However, based on the photo with the reddish orange fruit with green flecks, I’m betting that I’m seeing a papaya and not a Chinese flowering quince. I think Google Translate wins this round.

  • 西红柿鸡蛋面

    The restaurant translated this as tomato egg surface. Not sure how the relatively easier 面 ended up as surface. I would have expected the trickier 西红柿 to be mistranslated as western red persimmon. Google Translate offers the better translation of tomato and egg noodles.

  • 醬肉煎包

    The restaurant translated this to “The soy-sauce cooked pork fries the package.” Google Translate offers a translation of Sauce 煎包. Not particularly helpful. If I separate the words into 醬肉 ç…Ž 包, Google Translate then offers Sauce Fried package. I think Pan-Fried Beef or Pork Bun would be the better translation.

  • Restaurant Chinese

    Some colleges offer conversational Chinese. Others teach business Chinese. However, for Chinese Americans, the real deal is Restaurant Chinese. If you want to order off the Chinese menu, but can’t quite figure out a few of the characters, what do you do? At one point in time, I could only order dishes whose names I had memorized. I couldn’t experiment or try something new because I couldn’t read the entire menu. Now, I have a solution.

    ji

    Last weekend, I used the DianHua Dictionary iPhone application to order 红烧划水 and 京都里肌. For the first dish, I didn’t recognize the third character. For the second dish, I didn’t recognize the fourth character. If I used a typical Chinese-English dictionary, I would have to count the strokes of the radical, look up the radical, then count the remaining strokes and look up the word. A slow and sometimes unreliable process. However, in DianHua, I copy the character with my finger and the application tells me the pronunciation and meaning of the character. Yum!