Like we could do better.

I love going into Chinese restaurants and looking at their menus. Half of the reason is to look for the strangest food item on the menu; the other half is because I love to find typos. Now, if you’ve been to enough Chinese restaurants (not the whitewashed ones), there is a plethora of misspellings and misinterpreted English phrases scattered throughout the restaurant itself, not just on the menu.

I’ve seen signs telling me to “beware of the pickpocket.” (Who is this pickpocket? Is this guy the only one? Why hasn’t he stolen this sign yet?) I’ve also seen name tags on wait staff that don’t realize that you can’t abbreviate words just by using the first three letters. (He was an assistant manager.) But the menu is usually the biggest culprit of all.

Typically, the typos on menus are just small spelling errors that don’t really affect the appetite of the diner (roasted pappers, scramlbed eggs). Then there are those that do. I’ve had the pleasure of not ordering dishes like the “baked crap [carp] fish” or “poop delight”. (Just kidding, there was no poop delight; but boy, would that go well with a pea soup.) Sometimes it feels like I’m reading a 4 page book written by a 4 year old.

But then I think about how well America translates certain Chinese dishes.

Like General Gao’s Chicken, for example. Out of all occupations, why name it after a general? I’m not sure if a general would really want the animal symbol of cowardice to be synonymous with their name. I would have named it something more reasonable like Farmer Gao’s chicken or Astronaut Gao’s chicken.

Or what about the Double Happiness dish? Some people can’t find just plain happiness and this dish supposedly offers double happiness? I think a better name for this dish would have been "Cow and Chicken Unite" (or "Chicken and Cow Unite").

How could we forget the famous Pu Pu Platter? Enough said.

So before we go judging the mistakes of other people, let’s remember to take the planks out of our eyes. And use them as toothpicks. (wait, I thought I was talking about typos...)