Thai restaurant menus in Thailand amuse me.
For some reason the task of writing menus is usually left to people with only the most peripheral exposure to the English language. They are filled with cryptic descriptions and colorfully misspelled words. Reading–and ordering–from one of these menus is generally challenging and often amusing.
This afternoon I stopped at a restaurant on my soi to have lunch. Even thought I have read the menu dozens of times, I still snicker when I see “Fried Rice with Crap Meat.” While the description could be accurate, I just assume it was a bad attempt at writing “Fried Rice with Crab Meat.”
Misspellings often lead to a chuckle, but the descriptions leave me scratching my head.
If you go to a Thai restaurant outside of Thailand you are used to menus that list the dishes by some sort of phonetic equivalent of the Thai name. The menu will list dishes such as “Pad Thai� and “Tom Yum Goong� with a more detailed description of dish in smaller print.
The Thai restaurants in Thailand–if they even have a menu in English–rarely follow this convention. They forgo the transliteration of the Thai name and attempt–with whatever meager English language skills they can muster–to give the dish a descriptive name.
Unfortunately, the descriptive names are usually not particularly descriptive and often contain words you might never have heard before.
The menu from the small restaurant on my soi has such unpoetically named dishes as “Stir Fried Noodles,” “Stir Fried Noodles with Soy Sauce,” and “Noodles with Gravy.” From these descriptions it’s hard to differentiate between these very different dishes (which, it turns out, are Pad Thai, Pad Siew and Rad Na) nor does it do justice to the unique character of each.
“Tom Yum Goong,” a traditional Thai soup made with shrimp, mushrooms, lemongrass, lime juice, burnt chili paste and kaffir lime leave is unjustly labeled “Spicy and Sour Shrimp Soup” giving no hint of its depth and complexity.
At the same restaurant on my soi they have a “Near Table Saladâ€? and several dishes with “scomberâ€? as a main ingredient–very cryptic.
One a dish on the menu was labeled “Fried Sugar Peap Corn Mealie with Rice (Your choice of meat).” Peap? Mealie? I was pretty sure they weren’t even words. Fried Sugar? Huh?
That was so cryptic that I had to order it–just to see what it was.
It turned out to be chicken stir-fried with snow peas and miniature corn.
“Sugar Peap” must have been a bad translation for sweet pea (which is kinda close to snow pea). Sure enough, there they were, tiny whole ears of corn, no mystery there. It was a little harder to figure out how “Mealieâ€? wound up in the name. I found out after doing a little research, it’s an obscure South African term for an ear of corn.
Ordering a meal from an Engrish menu is a crap shoot; you never know exactly what you will get.
But herein lies Engrish menu’s greatest charm: the adventure of the unknown. The most delicious meals are eaten and soon forgotten, but ordering something mysterious and finding that you can eat–and even enjoy–something as off-the-wall as fish head soup is a memory that lasts forever.
