Sichuan food is now available right near SF State. The newly opened Fang Yuan has a Chinese American menu and an untranslated Sichuan menu. Here’s my go at translating the latter from a yelp photo.
Left
Couples Delight
Clear noodles with chili sauce
Chicken feet with pickled peppers
Red oil crossed arm dumplings
Water boiled fish or pork
Chongqing chicken
Fish slices in doubanjiang
Right
Mouth watering chicken
Pork in garlic paste sauce
Five spice ear shreds
Sour spicy noodles (rice or mung bean maybe???)
五更腸旺 wǔgēng cháng wàng Pork Chitlins with Blood Pudding Hot Pot (intestine, duck, and sauerkraut)
Garlic shoots (suan miao) with cured pork
Wine lees fish slices
Bottom
Fragrant spicy or jalapeño large intestine
Sichuan flavor or garlic whole fish
Dry fried yellow croaker
Red braised yellow croaker
Waygo tells me the fourth item on the right is “Eggplant with Hot and Sour Rice Noodles.”
I highly recommend the Waygo smartphone app for reading menus. It’s an efficient OCR tool that’s optimized for restaurant menu terms, and handles Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Wow, that’s an impressive app, it even does a decent job when pointed at my laptop screen. Quicker than Pleco, but the eggplant anomaly suggests the need to proofread. Its OCR mistakenly introduced eggplant into the original text by changing “酸辣粉 $6.99” to “酸辣粉茄自”. It added the character for eggplant, 茄, to a few other dishes too that cost $6.99. The recipes I looked at on google indicate the dish is Hot and Sour mung bean or sweet potato noodles, no eggplant.
The yelp dish photos are also on the restaurant’s webpage. The peas and carrots in the mapo dofu and the zha jiang noodles might be clues to stay away from the non-Chinese menu: http://fangyuankitchen.weebly.com
