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Mouthing Off | Hong Kong restaurants, put more pictures on menus to win back customers and tourists
‘Buddha Jumps Over the Wall’? What’s that? Restaurants should use more visuals in their menus, and maybe that could help draw more people in
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There is a lot of anxious hand-wringing these days about how to entice diners back to restaurants in Hong Kong and how to encourage mainland Chinese tourists to explore the cosmopolitan range of eateries in our city.
Well, one simple idea is just to put more pictures on menus.
I know for many chefs and restaurateurs, adding images of dishes to menus is not considered very posh. In fact, some find it cheap and tacky, devaluing the brand and assuming clients are illiterate louts. Fast food customers need visual boards to order, not fine dining’s cultured clientele. But in multilingual Hong Kong, maybe that assumption is false.
Having been educated overseas, my level of Chinese reading is far from mother-tongue fluency. In a cha chaan teng or local diner, sometimes I have trouble deciphering all the different dishes. Many of the Chinese characters might as well be Greek to me – which I wouldn’t mind because I like Greek food.
In more refined Chinese banquet palaces, the dish names are even more elaborate, sometimes poetic and vague. In such venues, being able to point to a picture and order is a great relief when I am unsure of what a specific dish consists of. And if the image looks good, I am more likely to try it than if I have no idea what is in it.
Some eateries might have menus in English but the translations are not exactly helpful. There are vague wordings that leave me scratching my head. Am I the only person who is befuddled by “fried beef with noodles” and “beef with fried noodles”?
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