Menu typos / bloopers

Do we already have a thread for this? I searched and couldn’t find one. There’s one for problematic menu design but I think that’s a different topic.

I came across this on the menu of a restaurant in my neighbourhood:

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A visit to a Colombian restaurant with a Chowhound friend in 2006 still cracks me up.

Pork lions.

Also, in one of my community cookbooks, Palacsinta / Palatschinken (Central Euro crêpes) was titled Placenta.

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It’s been a while since I quietly raged at “pre-fixe.”

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Lol, I suppose some parts of the world enjoy their Mules Frites.

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Steaming dough pockets with legumes and fungus.

Aka steamed dumplings with vegetables and mushrooms. Seeing that horrific translation was what prompted me to start my translation business 18 years ago :smiley:

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I grind my teeth when I come across ‘expresso’.

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Ai. That one is painful.

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I hear that more often than I see it. It’s usually coming out of the mouth of some pretentious prat.

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See also: Bru-shetta

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Oh, yes. The last time I heard that, the same person doubled down with, “I’m Italian, I should know.” It was in a social situation in which I did not feel pithiness was appropriate, but I definitely thought, “Yes, you should know, but you haven’t been Italian since your great-great-grandfather landed at Ellis Island.”

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I judge differently between what I think are understandable errors (eg a Chinese restaurant where they may honestly be doing their best to translate) and arrogant overreach, as in the OP’s mules. Or maybe we’re all wrong and they’re serving up fried donkey on a bed of seaweed.

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The mules must have drowned in the ocean.

A few years ago, a restaurant down the block from us offered “mescaline” salad.

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I’ve seen “House-Made Crap Dip” and “Chickenpox Pie” (not in the same store). I think the latter was probably a spellcheck help, if the author ran “Chickenpot” all together? Because right now that’s what spellcheck’s little red underscraggle (new word!) is telling me to do.

I also used to drive past a grocery/sandwich joint to/from work that offered “Fresh Buffello Fish!” and had it pretty much permanently listed on the chalkboard outside (in the Midwest we tended to call any sucker fish interchangeably “Carp” or “Buffalo”, although there was a difference). Given the store’s name hand-painted on the lintel was “VARITY STORE”, I guess “Buffello” was to be expected.

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That’s better than bru-shita.

An example of the ‘brings a smile to my face genuine mistake’ typo:

Banh mi with ‘mayonaraise’ and ‘hotdot’. At a very good banh mi stall called Hong Hoa in HCMC.

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“Roast beef with au jus sauce”

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image

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Trippy.

That no longer bothers me. I see it as the Americanized pronunciation.

“With au jus,” OTOH, gets me every time.

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Salads in France are frquently garnished with sliced lawyer (avocat). Its the same word, but it always makes me chuckle.

The English menu in much of France is almost always either run through a bad online translator, or the owner’s kid’s school project. More than once I’ve kept the French menu because the proudly proffered English one didn’t make a lick of sense.

I had actually chatted with Linguafood and was working on starting my own translation gig when we made the decision to return to the States

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