Restaurants take great effort to entice tourists and locals, and they charge for it. Then they go and spoil it all by putting out boards saying stuff like ‘Wrack of Lamb’ and offering ‘Samwiches’ on the menu. I’m not saying spoken English needs to be perfect, but for a menu or advertisement, it just makes the food look bad.
Why does spelling matter? See here. It really does matter, so much so that companies like Amazon pay people to spell check reviews. Whether the review is negative often matters less than if the spelling makes it look dumb.
At most restaurants I don’t care. My lunch kade has a menu which could be rife with typos but I haven’t even looked at it. I pay Rs. 100 and ask for lunch. When places are charging over Rs. 1000, however, the bad spelling leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Take La Rambla on Hotel Avenue, Mount Lavinia. They’ve redone a nice colonial house, have tasteful furnishings and I recently saw a Porsche Panamera parked outside. I ate there once and it’s pretty good. Yet their posted menu is retarded.
First off ‘Weekliy’ specials. Why? Then there’s the ‘Wrack of Lamb’. I had to look this up, but taken literally that would mean shipwrecked lamb or seaweed lamb, neither of which is desirable. Rack of Lamb is also disturbing if you think about it too much (could be boobs of lamb, or tortured lamb), but it’s generally accepted.
What really gets gets me is ‘Poulet a la Chicken’. Poulet means chicken in French. That would literally be Chicken a la Chicken. I mean, seriously.
As seen in Negombo: “Tit bits.” Really now, really? :-D
Hilarious! I know it’s not a laughing matter but it made my day. Esp. the ‘poulet a la chicken’. In my head though, it’s part of the ‘silly’-lanka charm. Not going to get too hoity toity miffed even if it’s an upscale place…..but I s’ppose you are right about standards. If you are pretending to do the dirty then you’ve got to roll like a bad ass.
Actaully it is ‘Weekliy Specails’.. which make it worse!
Written in the men’s dressing room at a very swanky members only club in Colombo: “no female kids allowed”??? I guess it meant “no girls allowed”. I thought I ll do my civic duty and mention it to the management which gave me a “ok then sir” smile and didn’t really care.
According to my idea, if standard and well reputed star class hotels do not care about these things rest of places probably worse than this. Anyway this might be because of less knowledge about the English. We have to admit that there are people who are still not familiar with general English though they thing they are the best.
It’s a simple matter to Google spellings in this day and age. There really is no excuse. It shows laziness and a lack of attention to detail, which makes me wonder what else they are overlooking. Storage temperature? Quality of water? Making sure fruit and veges are washed?
In a CV or job application, I’d usually drop an applicant who made mistakes like that.
On a lighter note, anyone been to “Francis” in Hikkaduwa? It has the most extensive and hilarious menu I’ve ever seen. Here’s a taster; let’s see if anyone can guess what it is: “BEEF CHATURI BURIYAN”. And no, it’s nothing to do with a biryani.
“BISTAKE” is another popular Sri Lankan dish…http://www.cookadvice.com/recipes/bistake_beef_steak-57007-recipe.htm
No takers? OK, it’s beef chateaubriand.
Yeah but what if it was Beef Biryani? It is, as you say, biryani not buryani.
Another famous SL misspelling is “pride rice” instead fried rice :) Imagine that! Proud rice!!
Haha…Blacker dat’s effin hilarious.
Don’t forget “lump rice”!