Itchy Oxford article

Understanding the menu

Itchy looks at how to ask for foreign or fancy-named food without

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Yet another night on the bevvies recently saw Itchy rolling home harder than Limp Bizkit’s Rizla. Eventually collapsing through our front door at stupid a.m., we were in grave need of grease. Out came the takeaway menus, and despite us being more lubricated than a baby seal in an oil spill, our ever-sharp editorial powers spotted a few classic typos: ‘spicy wadges’, anyone? Some sexually unbridled shellfish in th Oxford food eating gastro pub menus thai food italian food french food chinese food pronouncing food pronunciation a la carte late night going out visit day travel cocktails restaurant restaurants menu gastro pub

e form of ‘wanton prawns’? Or maybe you fancy a portion of saucy Chinese sluts – ‘hos in dip’ – moaning over a full-bodied glass of ‘red whine’?

Badly-spelt menus, especially abroad (check out www.Engrish.com), can serve up some inspired pseudo-dishes. But what do you do when the tables are turned – when the menu is written perfectly, but you don't even know what half of the weirdly-named dishes are, let alone how they're pronounced? With the recent rise of the gastro pub there’s been a backlash against pretentious nouvelle cuisine in favour of a return to hearty, traditional, 'proper' fare done well and described plainly. Despite this, there are still plenty of restaurants whose poncily-named specials can leave you sounding a bit special yourself (generally the same places whose portion sizes look like they were designed to help Willow slim down). More positively, the availability of far flung foodstuffs is broader than ever before; menus in Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Indian, Italian and more are now commonplace in Blighty, and it's par for the course to swallow your tongue as an appetiser when attempting to order your main course. Itchy applauds this wide choice of chow, but are the first to admit that fancy titles and foreign phrases make it tricky at times to spit out what it is that we want to eat.

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There are umpteen foreign menu pronunciation guides floating about on the net, many of which also have handy hints such as what food labelled with a certain Japanese syllable is likely to contain (www.chowhound.com), or how Thai terms relate to how delicacies are prepared (www.realthai.blogspot.com). These are great to brush up your skills with… but only provided you know in advance where you’re eating and thus what lingui-sticky situation you’re likely to face at the dinner table. Moreover, those of you with a lesser memory than a retarded funfair goldfish after several spins on the cups and saucers are going to have a lot on your plate remembering long lists of foodie words. Ladies could try the old trick of taping a crib sheet to the top of their thigh for sneaky sub-napkin peeks (copyright Itchy S.A.T. Mathematics, 1991), although you may receive a few odd looks from your waiter if you hitch up your skirt when you’re asked if you'd like some coq au vin.

Even if you find yourself taken totally unawares by unfamiliar gastro lingo, there are still suave ways to sidestep dining disasters. Not sure of pronunciations? Order by dish number, or just come clean; A waitress friend of Itchy's who works at a top French bistro says, ‘I’m much more impressed by customers who admit that they’re unsure how to correctly pronounce something than those who try to bluff their way through their meal in an attempt to impress. The best are people who can manage to take the Mick out of themselves; I had one diner purposefully pronounce each French word very literally in an exaggerated Northern accent, and a guy who looked at the specials board, sighed and announced to his date “Aw, I’m terrible at reading German”. Get in there with a joke early and you won’t feel so anxious about making a tit of yourself later.’

How about if it’s not pronunciation that’s an issue for you, but the larger problem of not understanding a single

word on the menu? If it might as well all be Greek to you, because, well, it’s all Greek, and you’re drawing a carte blanche on the whole à la carte, Noel advises, ‘Use your waiter. Ask for a recommendation. Let them know what types of food you do and do not like, and whether you’re in the mood for something filling, light, meaty, vegetarian… If they’re halfway decent at their job, they’ll be helpful rather than condescending. Enquiring about a recipe isn’t necessarily a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing anyway; in fact, it can suggest quite the opposite. Discerning diners know that what’s written on the menu doesn’t always reflect exactly what you get, so ask away.’

At least if you’re contorting trying to get your head around ‘il contorno’ and thought the waiter’s reference to ‘a rich jus’ was some sort of religious slur, you can find comfort that you’re probably still a fair way off some of the howlers Itchy's waitress friend has heard. ‘I’ve had “mer-ing-gwees” for meringues, “sou-full” for soufflé, and my personal favourite was the lady who asked me for "a quickie". I thought I’d earned the best tip of my life before I clocked that she was on about quiche.’

Itchy’s personal favourite harks back to when an elderly aunt announced what a lovely meal she’d had at the exotic-sounding ‘Alberoney’. Turned out she’d had a 2-4-1 pizza at All Bar One. Bill please.

If you fancy trying out your pronunciation of complex dishes, check out this top Oxford restaurant, La Goose d'ail.

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