Chop the Pepper Big Fish Head

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Shanghai has some fucking AMAZING food. Last night I had some kind of honey-BBQ pork with a side of (get this) dates stuffed with rice and glazed in sugar. With sprinkles on top, no less! Permit me to drool for a second ...

Tonight however, I walked into Tasty Hall, opened up the menu, and promptly saw this staring me in the face:



My favorite is "The Beijing onion explodes the fat cow." I just picture a harmless cow, perhaps a little on the "beefy" side, wandering around in a field in Beijing. Suddenly, an onion jumps out of nowhere!

KABOOOM!!! Cow giblets everywhere. The onion waits for a split second, calmly rotates around, and rolls off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

But I also like to imagine a platoon of west toast snow fish, spears at the ready, strapped into helmets and rattling their chain mail, gazing at a distant castle with a steely glint of determination in their round eyes.

Tonight, they invade.

(Ai ai ai, muchos peces peligrosos!)

Other delicacies on this Chinglish-ridden menu include:

• Pumpkin healthy fungus
• Burns the shrimp
• The XO sauce explodes the spiral piece
• Spiced salt little yellow croaker
• The Guangdong snake ground fries the cured foods
• Pineapple and the meat
• The gold garlic steams the Guangdong towel ground
• Pair of taste burns the dried meat boiler young
• The fragrant and hot string burns the big shrimp
  
• Fat cattle winter mushroom boiler young
• Tasty Hall water cooks big shrimp
• Chop the pepper big fish head
  

... and so on.

If you look at it long enough you can recognize patterns, like "burns", "cooks", "explodes", and so on. I'm guessing that "cooks" means "boiled", since it's paired with "water". "Burns" could mean "fried", except that "fries" appears a couple times on the menu. As to the other ones, well, I leave that up to you to decide :-)

So what did I have? Well, the "Tea tree mushroom and meat", of course. I had no idea what kind of meat would show up -- and now that I've eaten it, I still have no idea!

I wanna find these menu writers and hire them to write documentation for us :-)

In more word-friendly news, Shanghaiist posted an entry about an anagram map of the Shanghai metro. My stop is, appropriately enough, Huge Shoe Healing Communist Ascendancy (Shanghai Science and Technology Museum). And it's only a 4 kuai fare to I'm a Hot, Dashing Dinosaur. (Shanghai Indoor Stadium). Good times :-)