08.16.07
Updates to How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com
My new site www.howtoorderchinesefood.com has now been up for almost a month, and has been undergoing major updates since I first mentioned it in this blog. Since all of the pictures on the site are taken by me, of food that I personally consume, the updates have been slow but frequent, but now there are 83 different dishes listed, plus listings for various vegetables, fruits, and condiments. I also now have new sections on Chinese breakfast and seafood. Additionally many of the descriptions have been updated to be more insightful and less monotonous than they originally were when the site was first launched. In the future, I plan to add downloadable PDFs and hopefully a forum to discuss, what else but Chinese food. If anybody has any corrections or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here. In the meantime, check out the site, and be sure to recommend it to anybody on their way to China.
Sophia
said,
August 16, 2007 at 2:24 am
You did a good job. Maybe i’m the earliest to see your article at this time,it seems you sleep very late too.And i like your blog pretty much,that’s what i want to tell you.
John
said,
August 16, 2007 at 4:48 am
Ben,
I’ve often thought a dictionary of Chinese food terms would be great – so thanks for putting it together. If you’re going to create PDF’s – any chance you could create PDF’s that can be printed out as flashcards (e.g. with the characters on one side) and the Pinyin and/or English on the other side, for those of us trying to work on our menu recognition? You could use one of the business card templates in MS Word (Avery templates are good) to make it easy to print them out.
Thanks!
Alex
said,
August 16, 2007 at 7:24 am
I like it, but…
While it’s a useful, to-the-point website, I think there are perhaps a few things you could do, namely use a CMS and make it Web2.0y:
Adding RSS feeds, either for the site or for types of food would be cool. That would mean a lot more regular readers, but more importantly it would be easy to syndicate. Imagine every expat website and many personal blogs across China having a widget linking to your latest 5 posts – that’s lots of regular exposure.
Make it collaborative. Maybe do a LostLaowai-style revenue reciprocation deal. The thing is, the Dongbei dishes you have suck. Allowing everyone to post a dish, and perhaps have others rate it, means it would be more likely to cover a great variety of dishes, authentic dishes. Living in Dongbei I know the ‘Southern’ food we get is a pale pastiche of what good Southern food is really like. Tapping into local knowledge would be ideal.
Sorry, I seem negative, but that’s just because I think the site is an awesome idea and it’d be good to see it develop as fully as possible.
[I'd be happy to help if you want pointers to a good CMS/collaborative content solution for this thing.]
Jet So
said,
August 16, 2007 at 11:31 am
Ditto on Alex. Don’t forget to add in the Gastromonical capital of the Motherland – Guangdong or Yue cai (粤 菜).
Matt in Chongqing
said,
August 16, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Also, I know the website is geared to visitors coming to China so the translation of 哈密瓜 might make sense to them, it simply is not a canteloupe. 哈密瓜 is a different melon that is in the canteloupe/honeydew family. I’m guessing you know this, but the name comes from the town in Xinjiang where the melons are mainly farmed.
Florian Pihs
said,
August 16, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I thing Alex made a great point. The collaborative aspect is most interesting. I would be happy to help adding some vegetarian food for example, since that is what I eat every day.
Adding tags and a tag map would help to keep order in the future, collaborative mess. So dishes can be tagged as vegetarian and “陕西蔡“
Dezza
said,
August 16, 2007 at 3:38 pm
The website is good, but as a photographer, I’d recommend taking better photos of the food…try using the macro function (if you have one) on your point and shoot, zoom in, work with different angles/composition and lighting. keep on shooting;)
Dezza
said,
August 16, 2007 at 3:39 pm
a great food photographer online is Lynne in Singapore, her photos can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynnintokyo/collections/72157600033010825/
I’ve learned a lot from just viewing her work.
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 16, 2007 at 5:31 pm
@John
Flash cards are a great idea. I’ll look into that.
@Alex
I agree that the site is definitely lacking the collaborative element. I decided early on to stay away from recommendations since there are so many variables. The gong bao ji ding in one restaurant might be great, but in another restaurant might be not so great. I’ve even noticed you can often order the same dish in the same restaurant on different days, and if there is a different cook they will cook it completely differently. This is especially the case when you start comparing dishes in different parts of the country. For example when you order hot and sour soup in Fuzhou it is full of sugar. Inland, it tastes completely different. But there does need to be some kind of interaction. I was thinking a forum would be a good place to start. If people wanted to rate food, or give their own recommendations and what not, it would be up to them, and it would give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. I have looked around at online forums, and have yet to find one I really like. Ideally, I’d like one that I can imbed directly into the site. Another possibility is to add functionality so that at the bottom of each page, viewers could add their own comments. If anybody has experience doing this, let me know. By the way, what is CMS?
@ JetSo
Cantonese food is on the way too. Problem is there aren’t any good Cantonese restaurants that I know of here in Fuzhou. And most that are here just have 套餐. Last fall I spent two weeks in Guangzhou for work, and ate possibly better than I ever have before in my life.
@ Matt in Chongqing
Yeah, I think you’re right about the ha mi gua. I think I actually read somewhere in English where it was actually called a hami melon. Anybody have a better translation?
@ Dezza
You’re right on the photos. I am still pretty much a photography 菜鸟 and this is my first big photography project. One of the difficulties is that most of these shots had to be taken on the go, as for the past month I have been that annoying guy who always needs to take pictures of food before anybody can dig in. Any more suggestions though? What do you think about the contrast? I normally can’t do much about the lighting, since the photos are taken in restaurants. Usually I use the curves function in Photoshop to brighten them up a bit. I think the ones of the fruits and veggies look alright, but a lot of the pics of dishes are still quite sloppy.
Benjamin Ross
said,
August 16, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I’ve just learned a lot about photography from viewing Dezza’s site. Check it out. Definitely worth a visit.
http://www.maskofchina.com
Alex
said,
August 16, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Hi Ben,
CMS: Wordpress is a CMS, Joomla and Drupal, Plone,Wikimedia are other popular CMSs. Basically, they’re a way to write content for the web without having to hard-code the HTML yourself. They do lots of useful stuff like RSS automatically and make life easy in general.
Agree about the lack of consistency in cooking, and that personal views may not be the best. Thinking in the way Wordpress works, think of something like a post for each dish, then each user could add their own photos, comments, recipes to their heart’s delight. Note sure how interactive your want to go, but it’s a way to get people coming back. There’s essentially no difference between the tech that a blog is made from, and that a forum is made from – the difference is permissions – who can start a post/topic and who can make a reply. I’d recommend a blog structure because blogs tend to have better tagging, and forums often/usually suck at that.
I think it’s better to think about this technical stuff at the outset, because changing things later is a hassle, and if someone sees the idea and comes along with a better technical solution they could essentially steal your thunder/traffic.
Drop me an email if you’ve technical questions.
Cheers,
Alex
Dezza
said,
August 16, 2007 at 11:08 pm
hey ben, email me (email address available via my site) perhaps I can be your photographer for some of the dishes? i visit mainland china quite a bit..and HK (my current home) is the place to get cantonese food..
Mila
said,
October 10, 2007 at 11:01 am
Hi, I noticed the format of the site has changed, I like the cleaner form. Hope you can get the forum or some form of interactive section up. Otherwise, I’ve enjoyed going through the site (makes me miss my two years in Xiamen as a foreign student), and have recommended it to friends going to China this year.
Matthew
said,
February 17, 2008 at 10:40 am
Hiya, I think there may be a mistake on the ‘Non-alcoholic drinks’ page of howtoorderchinesefood.com.
You have bottled water listed as 矿春水 kuang4 chun2 shui3. Do you mean 矿泉水 kuang4 quan2 shui3, mineral water?
This may be a north/south difference, or a branding issue, or I’ve just simply got it wrong. It’s a really useful site though.
Matthew
said,
February 17, 2008 at 11:27 am
Another hesitant suggestion: on the Veggies page, I think that a 冬瓜 is a marrow in British English. The whole squash/gourd/marrow/melon family seems to have boundaries as vague as Chinese ‘dialects’, but it tastes the same to me….
Matthew
said,
February 17, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Regarding the unnamed leafy vegetables, Wikipedia confirms my own inklings that
油菜，上海青，花瓶菜 = Oilseed rape, rapeseed
菜心 = choy sum (although that’s arguably a Cantonese transliteration rather than an English name)
大白菜 = Pak choi in British English, I think
See the article on ‘Chinese cabbage’ for details.
This should be my final comment for now….