When I was about 10, my mother took a friend and me to France on the train. The journey involved a change at the Gare de Lyon and, with a bit of a wait before our train, we looked around for somewhere to pass the time. Like untold hordes before us, we alighted on Le Train Bleu, which must surely be the most famous station restaurant in the world. Certainly no other can claim to have appeared in Mr Bean’s Holiday as well as La Femme Nikita. It is the most elegant, too, a suite of grand rooms, originally built for the Exposition Universelle in 1900, with gleaming mirrors and ornate frescos by famous artists. It’s not easily confused with the Wetherspoons on the Victoria station concourse.
I am sure we went there by mistake. Surveying the menu, my friend’s eyes found a familiar word. “Are you sure you want the steak tartare?” the waiter asked. He confirmed he did, only to be confronted, for the first time, with the pile of raw meat. He swallowed it down as bravely as he could manage.
The summer beckons, which means Brits will be making adventurous forays into foreign restaurants. Ordering abroad has always been fraught for Brits, who for historical reasons have tended to be limited by language and tastes. The Telegraph letters pages were recently alive with the subject. In Belgium, eels arrived instead of the hoped-for steak and ale pie.
Attempting to order milk in the Hook of Holland, a reader received frozen kippers. Another asked for a four-minute egg in Munich – !in vier-minuten ei” – only to be told they had no cream cakes.
Historically the Brits have come unstuck when, like my innocent pal, they have hoped for a reassuring and familiar option only to be given something terrifying.
Take scampi. Here it means delicious deep-fried breaded prawn or prawn-like substance, possibly reconstituted shellfish slurry, a kind of oceanic chicken nugget. From Nairn to Nunhead, you know where you stand with scampi. Cross the Channel and it becomes something completely different, bewildering even: a langoustine tail, possibly even an entire crustacean, looking up at you reproachfully. Its shell-covered flesh says to you: admit it, you wanted me fried, you scumbag.
Calamari can be risky, too: look carefully for the surrounding words to check it will come in a carapace of batter. In Italy, pepperoni will bring you vegetables, while a latte will bring you a glass of milk, as though you were a child rather than an adult who doesn’t speak Italian. Most would be delighted with a Wiener schnitzel in Austria, but possibly not Americans who were hoping for a Wiener hot dog sausage. An entrée is not an entrée.
As Brits have become more adventurous eaters, another kind of diner has proliferated: the performative fancy pants. How disappointing to eat something “au cheval”, hoping for daring horse meat, only to find that it just means “with an egg on top”.
Sadly the sun is setting on these kinds of mishaps. Google Translate is making it easier for restaurants to write their menus in clear, idiomatic English. Most smartphones today come with an instant translator, one of those amazing technologies that has slipped by unnoticed amid so many other miracles. Hold your phone up to a menu this summer and try it: Japanese, Arabic, Hungarian, all rendered into English in a flash. Your device can speak, too. To the all-knowing iPhone, none of it is Greek, even in Greece. Where’s the fun in that?
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