One Restaurant, Two Menus

Spike's recent post on being taken to inferior Chinese restaurants in other countries when what you really want is to sample the local food reminds me of two amusing cross-cultural incidents in Birmingham some years ago (the original one in England, not the other Birminghams scattered around the world). Birmingham is well known for its many Indian restaurants, and has played its part in making chicken tikka masala "Britain's national dish", but it also has a sizeable Chinese community.

My brother (who's now travelling around the US with his wife) lived in the city then, and on a visit we wanted to take him and his then girlfriend out to taste some Chinese food. We found a reasonable-looking upstairs Chinese restaurant near the bus station, and settled into our seats to study the menu, which was in English. Then my wife asked for a Chinese menu, which was willingly supplied, only to find that the prices shown on it were about 10% lower than those on the English menu for the same dish!

Now two-tier pricing is not uncommon around the world - foreign tourists routinely pay double the local price at every tourist attraction in Thailand, for example - but it's not usually the natives who are being fleeced. When my wife asked the waiter which price we'd be charged, he squirmed with embarrassment, eyes downcast to the floor, but we ended up enjoying a decent meal and paying the lower price for it.

On a later visit we tried out a restaurant in south Birmingham somewhere (Moseley, perhaps?) Unlike most in England, it advertised itself outside as not just "Chinese" but "Cantonese", which looked promising. However, when my wife asked the waiter in Cantonese (which he spoke poorly - I suspect he was Vietnamese) for a popular Cantonese dish, they did not have it. Then another one - no. And another - still no. After several rounds of this fruitless exercise, frustration was setting in on both sides, when suddenly enlightenment dawned. "Ah," said the waiter, looking relieved, "You want real Chinese food. You'd better go to Chinatown." So we did.