Those wiki articles link to some websites sporting photos of signs and menus that are always fun to read. Yep, they're funny, and yeah, it's a lost in translation thing so it's not -mean- laughter or anything, it's just a perfectly understandable language mastery barrier. My Mandarin, after all, is spoken at a broken, barely grammatical, kindergarten level if I can pronounce the words at all.
(It helps too if you can actually read the Chinese characters so you can figure out what they're really trying to say or sell. Takes me a while, if at all, but I can generally figure out the food menu items via Cantonese and giggle at the weird Westerner choking at the offerings.)
But this is the first time... in homey Singapore too, that I have found something that sounds rather inedible in BOTH languages.
Seriously, what the hell.
I've heard of "Three Cup" chicken or "San bei ji" - which is intriguing and makes you want to find out more about how they named it (after the three cups of stuff they throw into the sauce, oyster sauce, soy sauce and sumfing else I forget)... and tastes really good, if oily.
Who in their right minds wants to eat "Funny Taste" chicken? Or "guai wei" ji pieces?
It's not like you even have an ounce of fermented beancurd or beanpaste in the stuff (which makes a damn good sauce too, btw.) It's just some regular soy/vinegar/sesame oil dressing with a bit of Sichuan pepper anyhow.
Apparently it's some ancient traditional dish from the Sichuan province and it really is named 'strange taste chicken' or 'guai wei ji.' Must be some novice cook who couldn't think of a better name when he concocted it.
But really, if the Chinese - who eat practically anything and even call frog a kind of chicken - think it tastes strange... Doesn't really give ya a lot of confidence chomping it if you couldn't see the ingredient list, eh?
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