What I ended up ordering from the photo. Hmm...
You’re hungry, you’re in Beijing, China, and you’ve stumbled into a restaurant where the menu is in pretty Mandarin characters with big pictures.
“Surely,” you tell yourself as you walk in the door, “pictures are all I need to order something yummy.”
Then you find yourself staring at the options on the wall displayed in the lower left photo in this article. Hmm… There appear to be six different choices, each with rice (that much is clear), greens, something round and brown, and then a different mystery meat in each square.
It takes some debating with your friends, but you finally conclude that the brown orb on each plate is an egg that has been steeped in some sort of sauce. Good enough! But what about the meats? Look at this photo with me and play along with this real-life guessing game.
Can you guess the mystery meat in each box?
Box 1: Clearly a chicken leg. Great.
Box 2: Duck leg? Looks crunchy and delicious.
Box 3: Um… steak?
Box 4: What the heck?! Pig hoof? Muppet hand??
Box 5: Um, more steak?
Box 6: Entrails of some sort.
I chose Box 3, thinking it was steak. It arrived and was not steak. It was… um… we think kidney? Or some other sort of organ. See the first photo of this article and weigh in. It looked like an infinity sign and leered at me, and I couldn’t get up the nerve to eat it, no matter how much I hate wasting food. The rest of the plate was very good, though!
The moral of the story: you can tell a lot less about food from photos than you think! And there exists a part of some animal that is shaped like an infinity sign.
For an article on blindly ordering food in Thailand, click here!
Well…almost better than tongue and kidney! But absolutely better than McD’s : )
Hehe– True
This made me chuckle. Remember something very similar in Nanjing, stomach was rumbling something awful that night! As much as it pains me, sometimes it just pays to go to mcdonalds….
Awww!
That’s so funny! By looking at those pictures, I thought that they were pretty good and chose the 1st one since I actually know what that is, but I hate how the food on the picture isn’t what it seems it is.
Well you know the saying, “You never know what it is until you try it.” All of that food looks really good, maybe not the best food int he world, but really yummy.
Even being Chinese, this scares me… A lot. I eat unusual food but nothing as close as this.
Ahh… Even though I was born in China and raised there until I was three, I just know the feeling of being a outsider. I can read most of the Chinese characters on the menu and “guess” what the meat is. SInce I’m not a fan of meat, I would go to a restaurant without rice platters ( rice platters are kind of like McDonalds’ Happy Meal).
I wonder what all that really is because I just can’t guess.
Look at the comments! Some helpful readers translated it for us!
I know what it is, my dad told me it’s a gizzard.
Well, really you don’t need to know Mandarin to translate. Just someone that knows Chinese in general because Mandarin is just a way to speak but Chinese is the way to write and most dialects will be able to translate for you. So since I speak Cantonese (if I did know how to read Chines) I could still translate for you.
The pictures don’t always tell the truth about how a item tastes. The best idea is to ask for a translatio, relying on pictures alone is a bad idea.
Forgot the ” n ” in translation.
I am native Chinese. Based on my knowledge, the English names for the set meals are as below:
Box 1: Chicken leg; Box 2: Duck leg; Box 3: Duck Gizzard; Box 4: Pig knockle; Box 5: Beef Sirloin; Box 6: Shredded Pork.
Very helpful! Thank you!
Ah, the perils of ordering food from a picture menu. I can’t keep track of the number of times my meal out in Korea ended up being still writhing octopus tentacles, some kind of flavorless seafood goop, or a chicken foot because of deceptive pictures.
I feel your pain.
According to the menu, it’s duck gizzards.
I was hoping that someone with Mandarin skillz would clue us in! Thanks!