At one time or another, everybody has seen an odd or hilarious listing on a Chinese restaurant menu or somewhere else around the restaurant. Sometimes it's just a typo, like Rock God With Corn Sauce, or Steamed Porn Buns.
Other times it's due to improper translations from Chinese to English, such as preserved vegetables showing up on a menu as rotten lettuce. This trend has been accelerated by Google Translate and translation devices which may take a too literal approach to translating the name from Chinese to English. Incidentally some of these devices are nevertheless amazing. I remember recently visiting a Chinese restaurant and not being able to communicate to the owner what I wanted to order. Ultimately he whipped out a hand held device, prompted me to speak into it, whereupon a little voice spit out the Chinese translation.
Despite the miscues, some of these translations are highly accurate and indeed can teach us about English language words we were not aware of. Back in the old days when there were no translating devices and Chinese names of new foods and dishes were not incorporated without a translated English name, I remember the arrival of ong choy in the United States, leading to various descriptions of the item on menus and causing confusion when looking for the dish. The most common moniker was water spinach, but it was also described on some Chinese menus as water convovulvus. Water what? Yet in fact that was probably the most proper English language name for the vegetable and it amazes me how unsophisticated Chinese restaurants were able to ferret that out back then. I remember another restaurant calling it something like sweet potato leaf tubers. That really puzzled me until I read somewhere that ong choy and sweet potatoes were part of the same biological family. Amazing, again!
This write-up on Chinese restaurant menu food translations was triggered by a recent visit to Dragon Garden Restaurant, the latest in a long line of Chinese restaurants in a second floor space adjacent to what was Hong Kong Supermarket in Monterey Park (now Good Fortune Supermarket), one of the pioneering Chinese grocery store chains in the San Gabriel Valley. The first occupant of that space back in the mid-1980s, Deli World Cafe, was sort of a mini-food court, where you would place your order at one of the counters and then eat your food at tables by a glass wall that overlooked the entirety of Hong Kong Supermarket below. Its opening was so noteworthy that it was reported on by the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. However as successor restaurants moved in and out, the glass wall was eventually replaced by a regular wall.
In this visit to Dragon Garden, I spotted a highly conspicuous menu item, Denitrified Pork Leg, for $24.99. In perusing thousands of Chinese restaurant menus over the years, one
word I had never seen was denitrified. In fact I had never seen that
word, period. Looking up the word denitrified, it seems to refer to the removal of nitrites and is more commonly associated with discussions of waste treatment. Well we do see nitrites in food, so maybe denitrified was properly used. However, beyond that I was still clueless, so I decided to ask around on social media. One very plausible guess was that denitrified was used to indicate that the pork leg is not cured, or not cured in the normal manner with sodium nitrite.
Another interesting response was from someone who found a 2013 reference to the exactly identical Denitrified Pork Leg being served at Formosa Bistro in Houston. The dish was described as being a deep fried, crunchy, greaseless, fall off the bone pork leg meat, comparable in ways to Peking Duck. That would explain the relatively hefty tab for this dish.
Ultimately the mystery was solved by my old friend Howard Lee, who was born in Taiwan but came to the US as a teenager. He says it's an upscale Taiwanese dish he hasn't had in the US where the pork leg is fried such that the skin is crispy, but the fat melts away. He says the more accurate translation of the Chinese name is no fat pork leg or walk-away pork left. But it's stunning that two different Chinese restaurants, miles and years apart, came up with the same English translation for the dish.
Props are in order to Dragon Garden for opening up in a particularly difficult environment. As noted the restaurant itself is on the second floor, accessible either through an interior stairway at the front entrance, or a very high, exterior, fire escape type metal stairway from the back parking lot. But with no indoor dining currently allowed, Dragon Garden is managing to operate in the small foyer area at the bottom of the front stairway, with a to go order table and a boba drink set up, with the drinks likely keeping them afloat for the moment. And hopefully despite the less than descriptive name for the dish, people will be able to discover this excellent dish brought over from Taiwan.