Menu

It's almost too easy to make fun of English language menus in foreign countries. From Ken Tynan in Bull Fever ("Anahogs in a Seamanlike Manner" in Spain in the fifties*) to, well, my own Eagle Dreams ( "fillet of beer" and "chicken FANTASY" in Ulaan Bataar in the nineties), these felicities have been one of the minor disreputable joys of travel writing.

But I have NEVER encountered a menu like this , one that made first me, then Libby laugh until tears ran down our cheeks. Starting with "Burns the Spring Chicken", and proceeding through the metaphorical "Rurality salad" to such masterpieces of incomprehensibility as "Wood flower picks sea cucumber hoof", "Szechwan fragrant celery type fries cow silk", "West celery fries the tripe", "Big bowl fresh immerse miscellaneous germ", "A west bean pays the fish a soup", "1 article pot: home town", and "Red date silk tube- shaped container steams frog". You might add a side of "saues", like "Block pepper sauce retchup". And you can end with the masterpieces: "Cowboy leg beautiful pole" (a Brokeback tribute perhaps?), "Carbon burns black bowel" (yum!), "J&J living the bowel", "Benumbed hot vegetable fries fuck silk" (WHAT?) and my absolute favorite "Fuck the salt (beautiful pole) duck chin".

* Can't resist a bit more Tynan from this neglected masterpiece-- what happens when a great drama critic does bullfighting, which is to say, eclipses Hemingway. But here he is just having fun: "I never discovered what these were, and did not dare to ask, lest they should be brought (or led) snarling and clanking and hornpiping to the table. I carry at the back of my mind an image of an anahog, feral and shipshape, which comes saluting into my dreams, disrupting every banquet my subconscious prepares for me".