8 Asians


03-challenges-in-chinese-restaurants.JPGSo, there’s a Chinese restaurant in my hometown that has two very distinct sides; the side that caters to the non-Chinese people and serve Lemon chicken, Honey Walnut Prawns and the Sweet and Sour [INSERT MEAT HERE], and then there’s the hard-core side with the Chinese-only menus that serves traditional northern Chinese food, and very rarely do those sides meet. It’s kinda like In-N-Out’s secret menu, except you have to learn another language and cheese isn’t involved.

Well in this case, a restaurant in New York was dinged for it by the NYC Human Rights Commission. Lesson learned: make sure your Chinese-only dishes are SO foreign that no sane white person would ever order from it.

David Lopez, a visitor from Wisconsin, contacted the commission after eating at the restaurant with several friends last October.

He and his girlfriend knew something was wrong when a waiter told them that a serving of rice would cost them extra. They had noticed Asian customers munching on similar dishes served over a bed of rice.

“Being Hispanic, we both like rice,” said 46-year-old Lopez. “We saw other customers getting a different menu. We were told we could order from it if we spoke Chinese.”

The prices on that menu, written in Chinese, were an average of $1 cheaper per dish.

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3 Comments to “The Secret Language of Chinese Restaurants”

  • Check out THIS Chinese menu. From China.

    http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php

  • I KNEW it! *shakes fist* well, I started to just order dishes I knew, usually by a butchered version of a Chinese name and sometimes that worked, sometimes they just hated me. There’s a place next door to my apt that serves a LOT of Latinos and accordingly, the menu is in English, Spanish and Chinese… and it’s pretty good food too…

  • You know it’s so true. I actually wrote a blog post about how my family went out to dinner once at this really good restaurant in the suburbs (they moved out of Chinatown), and we were practically the only Chinese people there. The biggest differences were what people ordered and how they ate (family style versus individual plates). It’s just a different culture that people don’t seem to know about at all.

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