07.24.07
How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com
The past few weeks, posts on this blog have been quite infrequent. The main reason for this is that I have been spending most of my time working on my new site, How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com (www.howtoorderchinesefood.com). The new site is now up and running and will be a comprehensive (as possible) guide to Chinese food geared towards Western taste buds. There are listings of different Chinese dishes organized by both content (beef, pork, veggie, etc) and region. Each item contains a picture, Chinese characters, pinyin, and an English description. In the future I will have many of the pages in PDF so that they can be printed off and taken along for meals to aid in ordering.
There is also a glossary to Chinese culinary words. If you’ve ever wondered how to say shiitake mushroom or MSG, this will be a good spot to look. In addition to Chinese food there is also a page on Western fast food terminology in Chinese, including those words specific to McDonald’s. For now the site is still in its primordial phase, but will will be expanding rapidly in the next few days.
How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com is the result of over 3 years of subsisting on Chinese food, and I’ve had a lot of fun creating it. Try it out, and check back frequently for updates. If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them as a comment to this post or you can e-mail me privately at bensinchina *at* yahoo.com.
Jeremy
said,
July 24, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Ben – good concept and I’m sure lots of people will find the site useful.
Lisa
said,
July 24, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Very helpful site, thanks. I posted the link on a China-adoption forum so I imagine you’ll be seeing some traffic.
MichaelD
said,
July 24, 2007 at 11:31 pm
heres another name for 油菜，上海青，花瓶菜, “青菜”, thats whats its called in shanghai anyway， and cabbage also has another name “卷心菜”. I guess some items are called different names depending on where you are.
Eric
said,
July 25, 2007 at 1:31 am
Great stuff!
Are you going to add an RSS feed?
ZL
said,
July 25, 2007 at 2:43 am
I think people may find some supplementary ordering related vocab helpful, like 带走，菜单，埋单， etc. Looks great though, now I need to get some lunch
jane
said,
July 25, 2007 at 3:59 am
you might want to point out that with a lot of the dishes you list as vegetarian you still should specify “不妨肉” as most of them are served with meat at some establishments, and you’ll never know ’til it comes out with bits of ground beef all over it. (this happened the other day to me, at a restaurant i go to a few times a week. all the waitstaff there know i don’t eat meat, but the waitress who took my order that day was new.) most of the 豆腐 dishes might have this problem in particular (especially 红烧日本豆腐–isn’t that usually made with dried blood cubes?–but also 家常、麻辣豆腐). 鱼香茄子 and 干煸四季豆 are also risky unless you clarify first.
and you left off the bombass vegetarian dish–泡菜土豆泥！！！http://www.haochi123.com/upload/2005_6/images200562816575455767.jpg
anyway we ran an article on how to order vegetarian in our first issue–if you want it i could ask the author; she’d probably be fine with it. a bunch of us 成都外国人都是吃素的人。
anyway, good start; i think this’ll be helpful to a lot of people.
Woaizhongguo
said,
July 25, 2007 at 10:49 am
Tomato and egg, my favourite, yummy!
Jen
said,
July 25, 2007 at 11:29 am
What if the employees at your favorite Chinese joint speak Cantonese?
Benjamin Ross
said,
July 25, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Jen-
Just print off the Chinese characters and show them to them. They should be able to figure it out.
Matt Schiavenza
said,
July 25, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Great stuff.
Jet So
said,
July 26, 2007 at 9:35 am
If it contains more than just Egg Fu Young or Chop Suey (both American inspired Chinese dishes), go fo’ IT!
Ji Village News
said,
July 26, 2007 at 9:44 am
Nice. I will point this site to my better half for our upcoming trip to my beloved homeland.
BTW, 干遍 -> 干煸, although I have to say 干遍 is kinda funny, in a wicked way, if you know what I mean
(Not mean to be a smart ass to point this out, though.)
Jen
said,
July 26, 2007 at 9:51 am
Awesome. Thanks!
Handan
said,
July 26, 2007 at 10:03 am
Very helpful. Just sent the link around to my colleagues, who often have to explain dishes to visitors who don’t speak any Chinese and won’t pick up the spoon without the assuarance that there nothing bizarre on the table.
Thanks a lot!
Anonymous
said,
July 26, 2007 at 12:07 pm
FYI, Chinese characters are not showing in my browser, however they are being show here at benross.net
Mila
said,
July 26, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Great listing! I’m recommending it to a set of friends going to BJ this November. Would you have a list of drinks posted (pijiu, kuanquanshui, etc)?
Benjamin Ross
said,
July 26, 2007 at 1:24 pm
@ anonymous et al
Please let me know if the characters on howtoorderchinesefood.com aren’t showing up on your browsers. Nobody seems to have any problems displaying them on this site, but for some reason there are some issues on the other site. I’m considering changing all the characters to GIF images, but this is only a last resort. Hopefully, there’s a similar solution.
@ Mila
A listing of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks is now up. Let me know if anybody has additions…I’m sure I’m missing a lot.
Yu
said,
July 26, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Try qing jiao tu dou si or suan la tu dou si (dont know tones)
But it is stir fried potato and green pepper or the same dish with hot and vinegar added.
Anonymous
said,
July 27, 2007 at 4:36 pm
The chinese characters are now showing. Whatever you did, did the trick
Mark
said,
July 28, 2007 at 10:56 pm
The alcoholic drink list can be especially helpful to clubhoppers. When I first got here, I would go to the clubs a lot but I didn’t know how to request this or that alcohol so I would scope out neighboring tables and point
. Every party-inclined foreigner coming to China should immediately familiarize themselves with Chinese alcoholic drink names.
Derek
said,
July 28, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Ben,
The Chinese characters aren’t displaying properly in my browser, which is Safari for Mac (I’m on Amy’s iBook). I would guess this isn’t a problem for everyone on Macs (usually Firefox is compatible with a lot of stuff that Safari isn’t), but it may be for those who strictly use Safari. Just FYI–
Derek
China Law Blog
said,
July 29, 2007 at 7:16 am
Great Job!
Jessica Jaffy Scher
said,
July 30, 2007 at 10:07 am
Hey Ben. You are becoming quite famous! First I read about you on Shanghaiist and now on Serious Eats. Sounds like you are keeping yourself busy. Hope you make it to Shanghai so we can catch up. Jess
Zhang Fei
said,
July 31, 2007 at 7:13 am
Under Xiang cai, you’re missing Hong Shao Rou (the Chairman’s favorite).
Otherwise, a great site. Keep it going. I hope it becomes a central resource for Chinese food. We really need one.
Zhang Fei
said,
July 31, 2007 at 7:15 am
Never mind. Just found it. Great site. Thanks.
Nicki
said,
August 1, 2007 at 11:20 am
What about adding some street vendor type food? 烧烤 shāo kǎo, 清补凉 Qing Bu Liang, that sort of thing. Plus, I think there is a serious lack of fruit. I enjoy the website! I have pictures (not terrific, but workable) of the two street foods mentioned above that you are welcome to use if you’d like. Let me know!
Jen M
said,
August 2, 2007 at 10:42 am
Ben, I see the same thing with the Chinese characters not showing up at the new food site. If you view the page source for each, they are using different character encoding. In your index.htm on the food site, try changing charset=gb2312 to charset=UTF-8.
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 2, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Jen M-
I made the chance you suggested, but then the Chinese characters wouldn’t show up on my computer. I am using Mozilla Firefox, and an English version of XP with Chinese font support….anybody have any other suggestions?
Micah Sittig
said,
August 2, 2007 at 10:41 pm
If I’m not mistaken, 菇老肉 should be 古老肉.
And I’m pretty sure the site is encoded in GB-2312. There’s a small typo, though: the META tag declaring the encoding on the site’s front page is not closed. When I look at the source in Firefox, that line is highlighted in red.
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:09 am
Micah-
Thanks for pointing out the HTML error. I made the change. Does this have anything to do with some people not being able to display the Chinese characters. Please excuse my ignorance.
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 3, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Anybody have any feedback on the speed of the site? I compressed the pictures at a pretty high resolution so that they would look nice, but the file sizes are a little large. Here in Fuzhou, the site loads a little slow. Anybody else think it is too slow, or is the speed just right?
Joyce
said,
August 4, 2007 at 4:41 am
Great website, you’ve put in alot of efforts and the materials are useful.
However I think a few pointers will make it even more perfect!
Snowpea isn’t called 雪豆 in chinese. it’s common name is 豆莢
水煮牛肉 isn’t beef cooked in soup. it’s beef boiled in a huge pot of oil. I hope readers who think it’s soup wont drink it by mistake.
mustard sauce isn’t infact like you said, “virtually absent” in chinese cuisine. Infact it is a condiment that’s regularly used in Beijing cuisine, in almost all cold dishes.
In your regional cuisine, I’m surprised Shanghainese isn’t listed, when it’s now one of the most commonly known region.
Broccoli is never called 西蘭菜. it’s usually 西蘭花
Scallion pancake is always 蔥油餅, instead of 蔥花餅. If you see a 蔥花餅, it may possibly be a thick bread like pancake with sesame seeds topping.
In your translations for 糖醋排骨 and 咕老肉, they are both “sweet and sour,” except one is pork and one is pork rib. In this case if you have 糖醋里肌 then it would have the same name as 咕老肉, right? The difference between 糖醋 and 咕老 is that 糖醋 sauce is only made of rock candy (or sugar) and white vinegar (the color comes from sugar browning in oil and soysauce) Whereas 咕老 sauce has a bit of ketchup, and always cooked with pineapple slices. The combination provides a fruity flavor.
At your burger section, you’ve mentioned that
“An often confusing point in Chinese is that the Chinese word for “hamburger” actually means chicken patty. If you want to ask for a hamburger, you need to ask for a “beef hamburger.” (牛肉汉堡 niu2 rou4 han4 bao3) ”
That really isn’t entirely so. The terms you’ve listed in top section are all from KFC, of course then their burgers = chicken burgers.
I dont believe anyone would expect to get a chicken patty at say, Burger King, Blue Frog, City Diner, McDonalds, Wagas, or Element Fresh.
I hope you don’t find my long comment offending. I just really hope this site would work at everyone’s best interest!
Andreas Koenig
said,
August 4, 2007 at 10:38 am
Hi Ben, as you are asking for the name of the muercai vegetable, I think it is this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basella_alba
So it has quite a lot of names, both in chinese and in english.
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 4, 2007 at 10:50 am
Joyce-
Thanks for the info and corrections. I think some of the difference in terminology may be regional though. I take it from your use of traditional characters, you are probably from Taiwan or Hong Kong, which might account for the difference. For example, in the mainland broccoli is called 西蘭菜, but it is possible in parts of the mainland or in Taiwan/HK it is called 西蘭花. Same goes for 蔥油餅/蔥花餅. The picture I took comes from a 东北 restaurant here in Fuzhou. They call it 蔥花餅. My friend from Inner Mongolia saw the picture and told me it is really should be 蔥油餅. Then I asked another friend who is from Jilin who said that 蔥花餅 is correct. It’s the old pop vs. soda controversy.
Then there is the whole “hamburger” conspiracy. I can guarantee you that in the mainland 99% of the time when you order a 汉堡 it is a chicken sandwich. A “hamburger” is a 牛肉汉堡． The terms I used are generic terms used at local fast food joints on the mainland which serve both beef and chicken. But I know from experience, even at McDonald’s order a 汉堡 and you will get chicken, not beef. I would be curious if this is the same in Taiwan or Hong Kong.
I think the reason for this confusion is that the Chinese seem to by in large prefer chicken patties over hamburgers. This could of course have something to do with the fact the first Western fast food chain to open up in China was KFC. I found out about the whole “hamburger” thing my first ever trip to a Chinese McDonald’s. The employee spoke English and when I pointed to the Spicy McChicken value meal she asked me
“Do you want just the hamburger or the whole set?”
“I don’t want the hamburger. I want the chicken sandwich.” I replied.
Confusion. “So you don’t want the hamburger…then what do you want?” she asked.
I pointed again to the Spicy McChicken.
“OK, but I need to know if you only want the hamburger or if you want the whole set.” she asked.
“I told you, I don’t want the hamburger. I want chicken.”
At some point she figured out I wanted the Spicy McChicken and I figured out that in China the concept of a hamburger is different than it is in the US.
Also, thanks for the 糖醋排骨 and 咕老肉 disambiguations. Actually, here in Fuzhou 咕老肉 is virtually impossible to find. Instead we have 荔枝肉 which is quite similar.
Joyce
said,
August 4, 2007 at 9:05 pm
thanks for the reply. Infact Ive lived and worked in Shanghai for 5 yrs. I purchased the personal laptop from HK, hence the traditional forms. So all terminologies posted are actually used commonly here in Shanghai.
Now i see there’s huge regional differences even within the mainland itself
Matt Schiavenza
said,
August 15, 2007 at 10:18 am
Ben,
Let me know if you’re interested in adding a “Yunnan” regional section, as quite a few laowai venture down here on vacation and might be interested in trying out some of the local food. There are some interesting delicacies here, such as goats cheese with broccoli and Yunnan-style mashed potatoes.
Also- isn’t the generic term for sweet & sour pork 糖醋 里脊? That’s how it’s listed in my textbook and that’s how it appears on menus here. Perhaps it refers to sweet & sour pork without any other add-ons such as potatoes or fruit.
Great site man!
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 15, 2007 at 10:41 am
@Matt-
I’ll let you know if I intend on adding a Yunnan section sometime soon. As for sweet and sour pork, I’m not really sure the difference between 糖醋 里脊 and 菇老肉。 That’s possibly because here in Fuzhou, both of those “dishes” are virtually non-existent. All of the sweet and sour pork here is called 荔枝肉, which I have yet to see on a menu any further than 2 hours from Fuzhou. My guess is that these names all describe a similar dish we would think of as “sweet and sour pork,” with the difference between the different dishes being no different than the potential difference between, say 菇老肉 in one restaurant and 菇老肉 in a different restaurant across the street. If anybody has any more exact information, please fill me in.
Chris D
said,
August 16, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Your La Zi Ji dish, i *think* should be called La Zi Ji Ding.
The La Zi Ji, or Chongqing La Zi Ji is the deep fried chicken (with or without bones) with lots and lots and lots of chili peppers and hua jiao. That’s the best dish. Ever! I find the La Zi Ji Ding (the one you have pictured) boring…
Chris D
said,
August 16, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Hmm, i’m actually in china – must be my corporate network tricking the site into believing I’m in Germany.
Liuzhou
said,
August 25, 2007 at 9:17 am
In your beef section, you have 孜然牛肉 and suggest a mutton alternative, 孜然羊肉. You’ve given the pinyin for this, but it reads ” 孜然羊肉 (zi1 ran2 niu2 rou4)” instead of yang2 rou4
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 28, 2007 at 9:41 am
Liuzhou-
Thanks for pointing out the error. Mistake being corrected.
Rob
said,
September 7, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Hi Ben,
I saw this mentioned a few other times, but I would really like to see a section that details what you actually need to say to get this stuff on your table. In any case, great site and thanks!
Rob
Benjamin Ross
said,
September 7, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Rob-
The idea behind the site is that you print out the Chinese characters and show them to the server. For people that can already speak some Chinese they can use the site to expand their food vocabulary. But if you don’t really speak any Chinese, the best way to communicate what you want is by using the written language. Because Chinese is a tonal language, you can’t simply read the transliteration and expect people to understand what you are saying. It doesn’t work. When I first began studying Chinese, it took me about 2 months before people could actually understand anything I was saying.
I found early on that if I really needed to communicate something important (i.e. an address, or in this case, what I am going to eat) the most sure way was to have a Chinese friend write it down, and then show the characters to somebody. That being said, I’m still planning a section on “Restaurant Chinese” which will teach some common phrases and terminology used while eating.
Colin
said,
September 28, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Hi,
I have only just discovered your http://www.howtoorderchinesefood.com/ site and would like to congratulate you on the idea and contents.
I would like to suggest, that in order to drive more traffic to your site, you add a section for friendly links.
I am regularly providing services (both business and destination/relocation) for new assignees. I will start to recommend that they visit your site. It would though be far easier if we could find a way to have a reciprocal link.
My site is http://www.china-expert.org and tell me if you are interested in a link exchange.
Regards
Colin
markov
said,
November 12, 2007 at 1:26 pm
hey ben,
this food site is awesome, we at nanjingnow.com wanted to provide something for the people in nanjing since a year ago already, but never got down to something concrete, cos we really found it difficult to do something as concise as yours!!!!
; )
anyway, we’ve put it on the homepage now as a link. hopefully, more people will be encouraged to enter a chinese restaurant and not be afraid to order their dish. we will too!
cheers!
Anonymous
said,
September 15, 2008 at 10:29 am
The site hasn’t been working for me for a few weeks now – a great loss to my lunchtime adventures. Has the address changed or something similar?
Muchos
said,
August 5, 2009 at 2:30 pm
just wanted to thank you for that site.
just exactly what i was looking for, my chinese is fairly average but I’m really stuck when it comes to dishes as I had to remember today, when I returned to China after 2 years.
As I hoped, someone on the Internet had already put some hard effort into some nice compendium like this. Thanks a lot! You’re awesome.