Menu Translation Fails

Prior to trips I do a lot of research on restaurants, food choices, prices, etc. Gotten pretty good at deciphering menus when there are language barriers though at times Google translate just doesn't do it. Once had an appetizer of what I believe (hope?) was actually cold cuts came out as "selection of cats". Posted a thread yesterday on the Rick Steves website about a Swiss website called smood that has take out menus for about a dozen Swiss cities. Mostly fast food but still useful. Saw that chicken wings in French is ailerons de poulet - quite poetic.

Someone on the other site posted a link to an old Graham Norton YouTube video of hilarious menu fails. It is but being Graham Norton may offend some. Fyi, Stanley Tucci was one of the guests and we are really enjoying his CNN Italian food series. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CkbHGH-NnkU.

Comments

  • edited March 2021

    If you have never seen the Graham Norton show, we love him, his talk show gets the best out of the celebrities amd especially Miriam Margolyes who has no filter whatsoever

  • It was fairly clean for him.

  • A Swiss restaurant story:
    After finishing med school, before internship started, I had a few months off. This was 1982. With a classmate, I did the classic backpacking/Eurailpass trip through Europe. At a restaurant somewhere in (German speaking) Switzerland, I took out my pocket-sized Berlitz 20 Languages of Europe to help with the menu. A Japanese couple at the next table was pointing and laughing as we were working on ordering. Towards the end of the meal, we had the last laugh when the Japanese couple wound up with a salad for dessert.

  • I don’t know what they had after the salad, but having salad after the main course is common in Europe.

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