Restaurant ordering guides
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Spicy Chinese Cuisine: A Restaurant Ordering Guide
After millennia of flourishing evolution, Chinese cuisine is arguably the most diverse in the world. A number of regional culinary schools – Sichuan and Hunan, of course, as well as Yunnan and Guizhou – have cultivated mouth-numbing, electrifying spiciness into a high art form, to the chagrin of bland-fans and joy of the adrenaline seeking gastronomes.
Heat aficionados, Spicy Chinese Cuisine was written for you. This pocket-sized guide contains photos of 100 spicy Chinese dishes along with their names and ingredients in English and Mandarin. Clear and easy to use, it makes ordering a cinch, so that you can get on with the tongue-tingling business of exploring the fieriest and most flavorful pepper-piqued fare that China has to offer.
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Johnny Laowai
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
But admin, in which reputable bookstores can one purchase these great, great books?
Bizarro!
admin
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
Aside from the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art and the private library of the Pulitzer Prize committee, you will find them in the usual spots, aka the Bookworm, the Foreign Languages Bookstore, and in crates (quickly) gathering dust in the tbj warehouse, lovingly tended to by our crack distribution team ready to fjord their ways through the stacks to hand-pick and courier you a copy at a moment's notice
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Yan Xishan
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
I think you laowais should learn the damn language.
Can anyone imagine a Chinese tourist in England busting out a cuisine book and pointing to a picture of fish and chips? Then turning a few pages and pointing to a pint of beer? They would get run out of the joint. Or at least ridiculed for their entire meal.
How Not to Choose a Chinese Name
Laowais in China
herojuana
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
Can the next book be entitled, "How to Eat Chinese Street Food Without Having to sh*t Yourself a Few Hours Later"?
How
Evil
Robots
Operate
ancicamila
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
Jenny Lou's
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
admin
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
and what a better way to learn it than with these books -- fully illustrated, with a list of every ingredient in the dish, featuring characters, pinyin, English, French and even Russian ...
Learning how to say "mung bean" in four languages is worth the cover price alone
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Yan Xishan
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
I am actually curious to see what is in these things.
Part of the problem is that contrary to popular belief, there are many many different kinds of Chinese restaurants. Each kind has its specialty, but they do have in common the dreaded jiachangcai--the lowest common denominator of Chinese cuisine.
So lets take the spicy dish book for example. Does it include duojiaoyutou--a wonderful fish head that you can find in some Hunan restaurants? If so that would be wonderful, but your average does-not-speak-putonghua-laowai would probably walk into a jiaozi joint and point pointlessly at his/her beloved picture book and bitch out the bewildered waitress for not bringing out a fish head.
My point--for the book to be useful for most restaurants it would seem it would have to focus on jiachangcai. Not only does this mean missing out on the best Chinese food, it also means there will be a few more laowai eating gongbaojiding.
How Not to Choose a Chinese Name
Laowais in China
admin
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
You talkin about 剁椒鱼头? Yes, the book includes it.
The books have a fair amount of standard dishes as well as less common ones.
A comprehensive guide would be more like an encyclopedia and would be pretty much impossible to port around, so compromises had to be made.
I think as a start, there's a bunch of good suggestions in the spicy and healthy guides, and I believe even long-term laowais will find some dishes they are unfamiliar with.
However, no, you will not find every dish
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Beijing Rob
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
S.N.A.P.
somebody
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
WHY no Spanish and Mexicanish?
We all need somebody :oops:
Zictor
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
Dude, chill out. Restaurant Chinese is a language in its own right. I am fairly more skilled than most of my laowai friends at ordering, but it still is a bitch, mainly for 2 reasons:
1: The vocab and characters used in restaurants aren't frequently used elsewhere, so it's kinda difficult to learn it in schools, you have to do it by yourself.
2: In China, they mostly only put names of dishes, and people are supposed to know all of them. In the west, the names of the dishes are self-explanatory and many of the less evident ones have explanations.
Come play with the Panda, we are harmless animals.
microphonehead
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
yeah imagine tourists and non native speakers having phrase books, those c**ts really grind my gears too. How dare they!
lodgerly
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
I like these two books.
At beginning, I thought they were books to tell ppl how to cook Chinese dishes...But later, I still think it's very useful, but just can't read them when u r hungry...
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Zictor
Re: Restaurant ordering guides
Yeah! They should learn to fluently speak the language of every single countries they want to visit, like the thousands of Chinese that are flooding the mos touristic points of the world!!!
Come play with the Panda, we are harmless animals.