Know what to order

A method for the worst version of the problem — an unreadable menu, a waiting server, and a phone with no data. Photograph it, eliminate sections, ask one question.

Not a pep talk about confidence. Where to sit, what to order, when to turn up, and which countries make solo dining structurally easy or structurally hard.

Turkish meals have an order to them, the meze tray is a menu you point at, and one famous mistranslation hides a whole category of cold vegetable dishes.

Mexican menus separate small plates from full ones, the salsa on the table is not decoration, and the beans are almost certainly made with lard. A practical guide.

Indian menus are regional, split down the middle by vegetarian and non-vegetarian, and cooked in a fat nobody prints. What the sections mean and what to ask about.

There is no such thing as a Chinese menu. There are Sichuan menus, Cantonese menus and Hunan menus, and they want different things from you. Plus how to order for a table.

Banchan are free and refillable, most stews are built on anchovy stock, and several dishes cannot be ordered for one person. A practical guide to Korean menus.

Vietnamese menus divide along lines most visitors never see — the noodle, the region, and the sauce. Here's what the categories actually mean and what the herbs are for.

Thai menus are grouped by cooking method, the heat lives in places you wouldn't guess, and one three-letter word does more work than any phrasebook. A practical guide.

Japan is harder for vegetarians than its vegetable-forward reputation suggests, and the reason is a stock that appears in almost everything and is listed on almost nothing.

Italian menus are structured in a way that quietly catches out visitors — a primo is not a starter, contorni are not included, and the coperto is not a scam. Here's how to read one.

A practical guide to Japanese menus for travellers — how they're structured, the words worth memorising, and what to do when there are no pictures and no English.

Fish sauce, dashi, oyster sauce, ghee, anchovy, lard. The ingredients most likely to affect you are the ones a menu has no reason to mention — and it isn't because anyone is hiding them.

Yelp shipped camera-based menu scanning in late 2025. It's genuinely useful in a narrow set of situations, and three documented limits explain when it won't help you.

Most people read a menu twice and order the thing they always order. Here's a method that gets you to a better answer in about ninety seconds.

Translation gives you a dish's name in English. That is a different thing from knowing what it is, what's in it, or whether you'll like it — and the gap is where dinner goes wrong.

Thai menus look intimidating and mostly aren't. A section-by-section guide to finding something you'll actually enjoy, and the ingredients that catch people out.