Chinese Dish Name Guide
Look up 64 Chinese dishes by Chinese name, pinyin or English, and see what the name literally means, how to order it, and which translations mislead.
A Chinese menu name is a label, not a recipe. "Fish-fragrant" contains no fish, "lion's head" is a meatball, and "ants climbing a tree" is noodles with minced pork. This guide lists 64 common dishes with the English name you can actually order by, the literal meaning, and the one thing worth asking before you eat.
Search the menu
Type a Chinese name, pinyin or English word. Category buttons narrow the list.
Menu structure words
Dish names are built from a small set of cooking methods, cut shapes, flavours and categories. Learn these, and most of a menu becomes readable.
Three sentences that do the most work
English menu names leave things out. These cover heat, allergies and meat.
"Less spicy, please — and no Sichuan pepper." Numbing and hot are separate; this separates them.
"I am allergic to peanuts — does this dish contain any?" Peanuts appear in kung pao chicken and many cold dishes without being named.
"Is there a version without meat, fish sauce or chicken stock?" Vegetables in Chinese kitchens are often cooked with stock or lard.
How to read a name you have never seen
Read it backwards: the last word is usually the main ingredient or the dish type, the word before it is the cooking method, and the first word is the flavour or the place. "Fish-fragrant eggplant" is eggplant, fish-fragrant style — not fish with eggplant.
When a name is a metaphor, the English should describe the food instead of translating the image. "Lion's head" survives only because meatball follows it; "ants climbing a tree" is better as glass noodles with minced pork.