No Translation

Places that offer an English menu, though helpful when ordering, are often places that non-Japanese people frequent. I don’t want to eat at places where foreigners outnumber Japanese. Of course the food can still be delicious, but I'm looking to experience Japan not the myriad of countries us tourists hail from.

The challenge, when I am able to find a restaurant nestled into one of the narrow alley streets that pepper Kyoto and Osaka, is that if there aren’t many foreign patrons there is a strong possibility that no one inside speaks English and I can’t read a menu written in Japanese. In Vietnam this wasn’t an issue because Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet. It has way more punctuation, but plug it into a translator and a word pops up. Or, if the food can’t be translated, searching it out online provides at least a picture to decide if that was what I want to eat for lunch.

Hiragana, katakana, and kanji don't offer that luxury. And although things are sometimes translated into the Latin alphabet (Romaji) that isn’t the most common thing ESPECIALLY if there is no reason to expect a non-Japanese person to use your services.

 

Ordering by picture

Some restaurants have pictures. The whole menu is seldom represented in photos but another desperate lunch search in Osaka (the restaurant I was looking for didn’t open until dinner) brought me to a random spot upstairs. Yakiniku was pictured on the menu pages and so I pointed and the server brought it out to me (oh my GODDESS, the best beef I have ever had in my life).

I also rely on patient wait staff when they present themselves. Not every place has patience on the menu...and I get it, tourists can be cumbersome.

For dinner one night, I passed a restaurant that had a sign outside by the menu that said no English that, in the way it was written, felt less like an announcement and more like a proclamation for me to keep moving.

I did.

The menu Google couldn't translate

That evening I did stumble into what looked like an after-work spot for drinks and small eats. The waiter looked over the menu with me and tried to describe items to me. She smiled and occasionally conferred with another waiter for clarification or amusement and I offered up my GoogleTranslate although it wasn’t of much use. Dinner was hodgepodge but I was delighted by the experience- especially as someone from the table that was sitting behind me stopped on his way out to wish me a good evening – in what sounded like practiced English. It was a kindness that was not lost on me.

Sometimes I play food roulette. Hanging with a friend in Osaka, we simply pointed at line on the menu. That turned out to be a plate of very flavorful extremely chewy cartilage. I chewed for about 10 minutes, like meat flavored gum, before finally giving up. Japan is an expensive country, especially compared to Southeast Asia, so food roulette is a much more expensive approach to dinner than it was in Thailand or Vietnam (where I routinely ate three dinners each night).

One night I was desperate and tired and ended up in a tiny little shop run by a husband and wife. She spoke enough English to explain that one thing on the menu was a set menu. I ordered that. It wasn’t my favorite meal, but the hamburg steak (something I'd been avoiding in Osaka because it looks like salisbury steak) turned out to be flavorful and moist in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

The surprise, the not knowing, is part of the journey. For certainty I could stay at home. I could cook all of my own food or read a menu in a language I understand. But if I did that I might never learn how amazing wagyu beef is when perfectly marbled.