Today is the anniversary of my very first post in the Chinese menu project!
Over the past year, I've noticed a welcome trend among London's regional Chinese restaurants: more and more of them are providing translations of at least part of their Chinese-only menus. When I first visited Sanxia Renjia in June last year, the interesting menu was entirely in Chinese; on my latest visit a month ago, it was entirely bilingual (and illustrated too). Similarly, Royal Palace now has an illustrated English translation of part of their Chinese menu[see footnote 0], and it's a decent enough selection that on my latest visit we ordered almost exclusively from this.
However, even if this trend continues and spreads, I still think it's worth being able to read the Chinese names of dishes. For one thing, the translated/bilingual menu is often only a selection of the full menu; similarly, specials boards are usually Chinese-only. Also, the Chinese name of a dish often gives you more information than the English name. "Noodles with pork", for example: is that 炸醬麵/zhà jiàng miàn, 擔擔麵/dān dān miàn, or even 螞蟻上樹/mǎ yǐ shàng shù? (As an aside,
bob mentioned to me the other week that he has a similar advantage when reading bilingual English/Spanish menus.)
On a more personal note, I am very pleased (and slightly surprised) that I've managed to keep this project going for so long. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who's encouraged me, whether by commenting here or in email, by sending me useful links, by telling me in person that you enjoy reading the posts, or by coming out for yet another Chinese meal with me and being patient while I photograph the menu and interrogate the waitstaff.
I do have a couple of requests today. First of all, is there any way I can make my posts more accessible to you? I try to strike a balance between overexplaining and underexplaining, and between avoiding too much repetition and assuming all readers have read all posts. I also try to use informative alt texts for images (would people prefer to see that in the main text as well/instead?), and to provide transcripts or at least precis of videos that are in English (I don't speak Chinese, yet, so can't transcribe those). In short, I want to do my best not to exclude anyone from being able to read my posts — so if you have any suggestions, I am listening.
Relatedly, is there anything you particularly like or dislike about the way I structure these posts? Do you like (and indeed had you noticed) the model of concept on Monday, character on Wednesday, dish on Friday, vague theme running throughout the three? Do I post too often for you to keep up? And so on[see footnote 1].
Finally, if there's anything you'd like to ask me, anything at all, this is a good time! You can leave a comment, or email me if you prefer (kake@earth.li). Or if you'd just like to say hello, there is a handy tickybox below (should work for both Dreamwidth users and OpenID users).
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Footnote 0: There is actually a faint possibility that my frequent visits and requests for the Chinese menu despite not being Chinese had something to do with this, though I haven't asked.
Footnote 1: Before I saw how popular last Friday's post was, I was also going to ask if people would prefer the Friday posts to have more of a focus on restaurants and less on home cooking...