I think eggplant is also a good choice because it’s something that that could be cooked many ways and is usually pretty authentic. If you ask them if they have anything with pork belly it will probably be authentic and they might recommend something to you. It’s kind of hard because there is not always a standard English translation for the name of a Chinese dish. Once of my favorite places in the delta has a menu that’s “fried chicken, congee, stir fries” - and the customer is expected to fill in the blanks. So much so that at a solid chunk of family-run Dai Pai Dong in Guangdong for instance, they don’t even have much of a listed menu. In sum, I think there’s sort of a shared cultural knowledge of what sort of things would be reasonable to order off menu, and the nature of Chinese food allows for the practice much more than western food does. Sometimes they’ll do it, sometimes they won’t, but if you’re feeling something in particular it doesn’t hurt to ask. To continue with the Cantonese analogy, if you see a menu that seems to have many Shunde style Cantonese offerings (stuffed chilis, deep fried milk, etc), you could potentially ask if they could try to make you a stir fried milk - a very classic Shunde dish that many chefs know but doesn’t seem to grace too many menus. Like, for example, if you see that a restaurant has black bean garlic clams on the menu, and they have beef & gailan on a menu… at most places you could say “hey, I want a black bean garlic beef, can you do that?” And they’d have no problem with it.Īt a lot of places, you can also get a sense of the style of Chinese cuisine that a place specializes in, and if there’s a specific dish that you want, you can see if they can whip it up for you. In truth, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that Chinese stir fries are quite modular in nature, so once you get used to it it becomes quite trivial to order off menu, much more than in a western restaurant. He was pointing at other table’s dishes that weren’t listed on the menu, when it was quite obvious to me that those dishes were just simple stir fries that those customers ordered off menu. I remember an Ugly Delicious episode where David Chang was giving a Cantonese restaurant in Toronto a hard time, really trying to wrangle their “secret menu” out of them - I’ve never felt second hand cringe so hard. There isn’t really a secret menu, but there are sometimes dishes that are inaccessible unless you know ChineseĪs a couple people mentioned in this thread, there do seem to be a smattering of joints in the USA that have specials/a selection of more authentic fare written in Chinese, so I don’t want to say it’s 100% a myth, but… I think it’s mostly a myth. Sometimes the waitstaff will suggest things that fit in with your meal - sometimes those dishes are only accessible to those who know Chinese. Sometimes you need to be able to “order well” like really put together a good lunch or dinner in combination and have a back and forth with the wait staff where you’re discussing how food goes together. You’re going to have to know Chinese food + language to do this though. Sometimes when the staff is all Chinese but the menu is very American-Chinese (sweet and sour pork, crab Rangoon, honey walnut shrimp) you can just ask for dishes that take ingredients they have but are off menu - my cousin used to own a pretty crappy tourist Chinese restaurant in Rome - we ate there once and the food was super good and authentic but we didn’t order off the menu, we just told the waiter what we wanted. Oftentimes market specials with something they bought fresh are listed only in Chinese on temporary signs (chalk, white erase board, etc) are placed somewhere
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