When you travel around the world, especially to those countries far from your own culture, does it happen to you as well that even if you receive a menu in English at the restaurant, you’ll be like:“what does it mean?? I just want a dish!”?
It happens to me a lot! XD
This is because each country and cuisine has its own type of food and ingredients that can’t be translated into English! Jianbing is a tasty Chinese street food that looks like a wrap, but there is no name for it in English! In Italy, you can find a menu in English in a restaurant if you are lucky, but even though, you might find “Caserecce with Gorgonzola”, do you actually know what it is? It’s a type of pasta “Caserecce” made with a type of cheese “Gorgonzola”.
When I moved to Italy and started learning Italian, restaurant menus had always been a nightmare. Even when I started speaking Italian fluently, it was hard to understand the menus, because for example, there are over 200 types of pasta, each one with a different name, and most of them have the only meaning of pasta! So… you can only learn them in a restaurant…
For this reason, I really appreciate all restaurant reviews with a picture of the recommended dish, it’s much easier to understand and it inspires appetite. Then I started posting food pictures to help others as well:
Sirolo in Marche, Italy, has fantastic “tagliere”: a mix of several types of ham and cheese, with some local wine, that’s the right way to enjoy life!
Chinese dumplings are quite famous, traditional food for Chinese New Year and what used to be considered the tastiest food in the old days: 好吃不如饺子，坐着不如倒着 – Chinese saying “whatever is tasty but not as much as dumplings, sitting is comfortable but not as much as laying down”, last part is just to rhyme.
So do you agree? If you think it’s useful to get inspiration from pictures when you have to choose a dish, then start sharing now! You can’t imagine how many people will be thankful! 