Three Kilogram Scallop? A Restaurant Language Mishap in Taipei, Taiwan

Ordering food in a restaurant should be a straightforward business. But not when there’s language barrier, and a menu card is written in a Chinese language that is beyond your group’s comprehension.

I went for the first time in July 1994 to Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan (officially the Republic of China). We participated in a scientific conference (held from 18-21 July 1994) titled Seventh International Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade.

One night, we (a group of around 12 southeast Asian nationals) walked around the city and picked a restaurant in random for our dinner. Although the menu card was written in Chinese, there was a picture and a number for most dishes. The first waitress who came to us had a hard time comprehending our orders. Hence, we started to get impatient.

We became grateful when another waitress approached our table. She looked both pretty and smart, spoke passable English, and took our orders rather handily. One colleague added a plate of baked scallop (Figure 1) as part of our collective orders. She responded that there was no problem, as she knew what a scallop was.

Figure 1. Baked scallops as specialty dish.

Notethat scallops in the wild look quite different from the cooked meat of scallop dishes that are quite common in Chinese restaurants. Chlamys senatoria (Gmelin, 1791) is among the popular species of scallop (Figure 2). Taxonomically, scallop is a shellfish or mollusk having fluted shell valves that belong to the family Pectinidae. 

Figure 2. A species of scallop (Chlamys senatoria). (Photo credit: Kris Angeli Sanchez).

Within half an hour, all our orders came, except for the scallop. We started eating leisurely. When we asked the waitress about it, she mentioned that it was “taking some time to cook” the dish. In another thirty minutes, we almost finished all the food but the scallop had not yet arrived. We started to sense that something was wrong, because it should not take long to cook scallops. When we called the waitress’s attention again, she said that the scallop was finally coming.

We were all shocked when another waitress brought a huge plate containing a large, steaming mullet-like fish (Figure 3) on our table! It was well-presented with an elaborate side dish of mixed veggies. It weighed at least three kilograms and cost US$40! By whatever language mishap, the scallop (a shellfish) had simply turned into a huge bony fish.

Figure 3. Caricature of our shocked group members seeing that the ordered scallop has turned into a big fish.

Copyright 2019 © Michael D Pido

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