I am more forgiving with spelling issues and strange phrases/descriptions than i am an eclectic menu. For example if the restaurant serves ceviche, paella, guacamole, gazpacho and quesadillas i am much more likely to pass than if it was an all mexican or all spanish menu with a few awkward translations.
1 Like
The more important thing is whether the food is good, I could give a rat’s a$$ whether they can spell or not.
A lot of really delicious places barely have menus, much less correct spelling.
1 Like
Not sure where you are, but here in New jersey, lots of Chinese restaurants have photographs on the walls. They’re usually old and so faded that the food pictured in them looks disgusting, and are almost always the sign of a primarily take-out Americanized restaurant.
1 Like
I remember those mass produced, faded wall photos of General Tso’s in early 90s Long Island take out places!
I’m in San Francisco. I was referring to restaurants that list Chinese characters (usually English too) and dishes a (non-chinese) American might not recognize or want— whole fish, bone-in, offal, or chili pepper laden dishes that telegraph “not for me” to a lot of people.
In my part of the UK, it seems to be common for Sichuan/Hunan restaurants to have photos on the menus. Cantonese/Hong Kong places seem to manage very well without them. I’m not sure whether it’s the relative newness of Sichuan food here - although regarding the place we usually go, we’ve only ever been the only non-Chinese people eating, so maybe not. Maybe it’s not just relatively new to Anglos but also to the mainly Hong Kong heritage of most British Chinese.
A tamale joint near me specializes in tamales Mexico City style which are 3 or 4 times as large as a Tex-Mex tamale, with a very dense, firm masa and a higher ratio of masa to filling. Their website used to default to the Spanish language version and you had to opt for English, which I did since my Spanish wasn’t quite good enough to understand everything. One of the English language listings for tamales was ‘Sweet Tamale with Hand Grenade.’ In Spanish that was Tamal de dulce con piña.
I knew what piña meant, but I didn’t order that one, just to be on the safe side 
.
Generally speaking, mispellings or wretched translations don’t bother me to the point of leaving a restaurant. Sometimes they can be fun to try to figure out.
5 Likes
Great link. I miss chowhound. It’s funny to read the posts from 2012 about “odd foods Americans won’t eat”. Now fish maw, tendon, and gai lan are available (almost) everywhere. Heck, in 2012, we didn’t even yet have Sichuan peppercorns in America.
2 Likes
For some reason we have a lot of Oaxquenos here in NJ, so you can easily find the Oaxacan Tamales wrapped in a banana leaf with either the red or green sauce.
The bone in chicken they use in these is a little disconcerting until you get used to it, but the tamals themselves are absolutely delishus.
Btw, Oaxaca really got hammered in the big earthquake down there a couple weeks ago.
There s a Oaxacan lady who has a taco joint and bar in the 8th arrondissement in Paris. The expat community flocks there for good tacos.
1 Like
We get a lot of tlayudas and mole sauces here too.
A tlayudas if you haven’t heard of it is a crispy fried tortilla covered in refried beans, crema, and salad. It’s like a big flat tostada.
Mexican mole sauces are famous but within Mexico, Oaxaca is famous for mole sauces Oaxaca is known as the land of seven moles.
Which one are you talking?
I just saw this, no Paris 8.
http://www.lexpress.fr/styles/saveurs/restaurant/adresses-ou-manger-des-tacos-a-paris_1916823.html
Wow France is really in trouble now.
If this goes anything like the States pretty soon you will be seeing “les tacos” made out of anything and everything.
Tacos bourguignon anyone?
Just hope you don’t get a Chipotle…
Apparently it’s too late.
And, as if it were possible, the food at the French version is apparently actually worse than in the States. And twice as expensive to boot…
Which further apparently does not preclude Americans from driving 2 hours and writing lengthy reviews on how these compare to US Chipotle’s.
Holy Crap wrapped in a tortilla !
Ugh ! Awful !
There’s two sides to the Chipotle coin.
On the one hand, the UK has five branches.
On the other hand, they are all in London so easily avoided by most of us.
1 Like
Is it possible that Chipotle is the worst chain restaurant ever?
To be picky, the singular is “tlayuda”. (When using a term from a non-Indo-European language like Nahuatl, it is certainly not obvious that the singular would not be “tlayudas”.)
I usually describe it to non-foodies as a Mexican pizza–not entirely accurate, but it gives them the idea.
Brain fart. …Candelaria in the 3rd.
I could walk there but don’t always keep track of the arrondissement
1 Like
