08.07.08
How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com Updates…just in time for 8/8/08
As Beijing puts the finishes up its remaining last minute touches for the Olympics, I have been doing the same for How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com. In the past 24 hours, I have added several new dishes, brushed up some of the descriptions, and most importantly, the guides are now available in PDF format. This means you can now either print them out or save them to your iPhone or PDA, and take them along when you dine. The PDFs can all be accessed on this page, as well as on the original page of the respective ordering guide.
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For those who are not already familiar with it, How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com is a site that I started last summer just before I left China. The idea behind the site was twofold. Firstly, it’s a guide for ordering food in China for people who can not speak Chinese. Secondly, it’s an educational tool for those who can already speak some Chinese but want to improve their culinary vocabulary. In addition to providing information on ordering Chinese food, there is also an extensive Chinese culinary glossary with everything from a leafy vegetable disambiguation page to a page on the Chinese terminology of American fast food.
I got the idea for How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com from my own first experiences in China. At that time I could neither speak nor read Chinese. I found that the most efficient way to order food was to have Chinese friends write the names of all the dishes I liked in a notebook with the English translations next to them. I couldn’t read or pronounce a single character of what they wrote, but that didn’t matter. Whenever I dined out, I would go armed with my notebook. When the waitress came to my table, I would point to the different characters in the notebook and the waitress would know exactly what I wanted to order.
How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com is designed to do all of this for you. The site is broken down into multiple guides. Each guide is based on a theme. The different themes are based around particular foods (i.e. pork dishes, veggie dishes, rice based dishes), as well as by region (i.e. Hunan, Sichuan, Dongbei). Each guide contains a list of entrees, with the name in Chinese characters and pinyin (Romanization), as well as an English description and a photo. With the guides in hand, you will no longer be confined to eating only in restaurants with English menus, or bringing along a translator. Try them out, and be sure to send me any feedback you might have.
Nick
said,
August 7, 2008 at 7:08 pm
The How to Order site looks good, have you seen this though:
http://www.for68.com/new/2008/6/li8655365544181680024816-0.htm
Tong
said,
August 7, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Ben, It is such a thoughtful and wonderful website! I skimped through couple pages, will look through them thoroughly later. Just couple questions at the first glance. shouldn’t 鸡抓 be 鸡爪（ji1 zhua3） and 葱花饼 be 葱油饼 （cong1 you2 bing3）? You didn’t mention 童子鸡（chicken without sex）.
NJD
said,
August 8, 2008 at 3:00 am
Nick,
Wow, great link, that site is serious, now if they could just get a decription and picture for all 2 billion dishes and maybe some pinyin, it would be exponentially evem more impressive.
Tong
said,
August 8, 2008 at 5:30 am
Nick, I checked out the website and spotted quite a few inaccuracies just on the first page. Whoever created the web did it in a hurry. I.E: 夫妻肺片, it translated to “Pork Lungs in Chili Sauce”. 夫妻肺片 is a dish of the cow insides, has nothing to do with pork. And every dish with “五香” in it was translated to “spicy”, the matter is, “五香” means “five spice”, these dishes are not spicy. And “素鸭” is translated to “Vegetarian Duck”, but the dish is strictly Tofu with duck favor. The problems with this website are endless, I like Ben’s better personally, his is more authentic.
Tong
said,
August 8, 2008 at 5:36 am
Oh, one more(cannot help laughing about it) the translation for ‘糖蒜” – “sweet garlic” seems to come straight out of a online translator. The dish consists of pickled garlic, trust me, it is anything but sweet.
Fiona
said,
August 8, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Great work–I’m rather hungry now! Before you leave Beijing, let’s go to the Dongbei provincial restaurant and add to the Dongbei section!
Nick
said,
August 8, 2008 at 2:48 pm
As I understand it, the site I gave the link for above is the official translation of Chinese dishes as approved by the Beijing government. See – http://olympics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/chinese-food-translations-sweet-sour-and-downright-odd/
Yueting
said,
August 9, 2008 at 7:31 am
Gosh….I miss Chinese food….I never into Orient food so much…
Yueting
said,
August 9, 2008 at 7:32 am
Just found the flag behind my name turns to “The Star-Spangled Banner”….Yeah!
Vanilla
said,
August 9, 2008 at 2:10 pm
To Tong
As you refered “糖蒜” is pickled indeed,but it is pickled with sugar. It’s actually sweet. Believe it or not, try it!