Despite living in Hong Kong and traveling frequently to Shenzhen at the time, I found out from a high school buddy from growing up in Ohio that lived in the USA and had no real connection to China besides this one business trip.
It appears someone who couldn't read english at all had used baidu translate to translate the menu. It turned out baidu translate was translating "扒饭" - assorted grilled meats - to my Twitter (HN, etc) username for YEARS.
Naver, a major Korean website, has its own MT service called Papago [1] which rivals Google translate for supported language pairs. One day it started to translate a URL to Amazon German to an email address of my friend, who is a member of the KDE localization team and presumably his address made into the bilingual corpus Papago used. It took him years and also a governmental intervention to realize the origin of mysterious emails and sort the whole thing out.
Hey, the first time I visited Vietnam I was blind tired from traveling, sat down at an outdoor restaurant on a kindergarten sized chair, got a warm beer and looked at a menu where everything was in Vietnamese. The only thing in English was "AMERICAN BEEFSTEAK". So I ordered that (dumb, sure, but they were really amused to have an actual American there. It was a really fun scene, late night and lit up, busy joint).
I'm pretty much 100% certain that what came out of the kitchen was a filet of dog. It was a piece of meat. It was a bit charred. Definitely neither pork nor beef. But red. Thin, like it was from alongside the ribs of a medium sized animal. Gamey. A bit stringy. Tough. I ate it, but I cried inside. (My ex got some nameless white fish from the Mekong and was sick for a couple days, so I was kinda lucky).
So yeah, watch out for when they translate you into "American-style" something. What they usually mean is "barbarian" lol
My only hope that maybe I didn't eat dog came after I'd lived there for a few months, and realized dogs are relatively special dishes. A restaurant across the street from me kept one in a cage on the side of the patio, which I'm pretty sure was eaten for a wedding. (It disappeared the same night as most of the fish in their tank). Having said that, the "american beefsteak" was definitely expensive compared to everything else on the menu, and was certainly a premium item.
It's true though that regular chicken in Vietnam is as gamey as duck, because it isn't hormone-fed and water filled. So maybe this was just beef. But I never had any other beef there that tasted like it.
I will explain the reasonings, but I hope that you don't have to read on and just believe my intuition that you really ate beef. This is better for your peace of mind I think :-)
- Dog meat is served in specific places, it's not something widely available (like you noticed in your reply). The place that serves it will usually have "Dog meat" in the name of the restaurant (in Vietnamese: "Thit cho")
- You mentioned sitting outside on "kindergarten-sized chair". This is what Vietnamese people call "quán vỉa hè" and not many of those places serve dog meat.
- You mentioned "a filet of ..." "a piece of meat" "a bit charred" and "red". Out of those 4 bits of information, only "a bit charred" makes sense for dog meat. But dog meat is always cooked into some special dishes, and never "filet" with just "one piece".
- If the menu was all in Vietnamese and only one item had English, saying "American Beefsteak" and being priced higher, then it would be a special cut of Beef aimed towards foreigners.
- "Gamey" "A bit stringy" "Tough" is exactly the words describing texture of Vietnamese beef, some specialty beef places will have this type of beef cut (remember, you're in a country where for most people the best way to eat beef is to have it diced thin stir-fried, cooked well done. people don't usually eat steaks.)
Keep in mind that:
- This varies a lot depending on the parts of the country where you visited. Since you did not specify where you ate this, I'm assuming Urban/City outskirts area, belonging to a Southern city/province or Northern city/province and am basing my intuition on this. If this happened in a very rural area or mountainous area, then my comments on dog meat being served in special places does not apply, but the comments about the meat you described still apply.
- Dog meat page on Vietnamese Wikipedia (graphic images, beware): https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 (some images from S.Korea and China mixed in, Vietnamese prepare their dogs differently)
Fun fact: just as the Chinese (and I think other asian cultures) utilize "rice"(their staple grain) as a synoym for a meal so in English we use the concept of a staple grain as a synoym for a meal: meal.
As far as I can tell, "meal" (time) and "meal" (flour) have different etymological origins. There was still a difference in spelling in Middle English (mel vs mele), but that distinction was lost in Modern English.[0]
I've heard it as "breaking bread." I like the phrase. But yeah, it's essentially the same as eating bread, and it clearly refers to having a meal and is not limited to bread.
That's because in Victorian times the lower classes often couldn't afford a meal at that time and had to subside on some tea and perhaps a slice of bread.
The use of "tea" for that meal remains a class signifier; my paternal grandmother used it, my parents did not (my mother, despite not being a native speaker, presumably is the one who eradicated it from my father's vocabulary), and yet I continue to say unwittingly say it occasionally though I now live in the USA. A vestigial Australianism in my case
It's definitely "non-U" in the UK, though that whole world is mostly gone.
I'm also a random person on the Internet, but I can confirm that "饭" can mean both "rice (米)" or meal, depends on the combination of word. "吃饭" almost always mean "have/having/had a meal".
However, based on my research (1), "扒饭" is likely a meal type rather than an action. For example, "鸡扒饭" consists of a bowl of rice covered by a layer of pre-cooked chicken breast plus some veggies. The rice itself seemed normally cooked, not grilled. And yes, this sounded very similar to "盖浇饭" which is also a meal type.
(Me been a local to the country, you would assume that I knew this kind of things. Well...no, this is the first time I learned this term. But if someone asks me "Hey do you want some 鸡扒饭?", I'll take my chances.)
I'm a native Chinese. I think it's 猪扒 饭 or 鸡扒 饭, 猪扒=猪排=pork chops*.
Note: 排 literally means ribs. But this dish has been evolved quite a bit and now 猪排 could be any part of pork, and I'd say pork chop is actually more common than actual ribs nowadays. Same goes to chicken - 鸡排/鸡扒 is typically just chicken breast (not like chicken has ribs to begin with, hehe).
no 吃饭 doesn’t always mean have a meal, when asking if some one would prefer rice or noodle, it’s ‘吃饭还是吃面‘ ( you eat rice or noodle), it heavily depends on the context.
Reminds me of a Chinese menu item that was translated into Korean as "서부 아프리카 원주민의 쓰라린 추위" (bitter coldness of indigenous Western Africans). Made rounds in the Korean internet some years ago.
At least you can't fake French cuisine. There's no powdered substitute for actual pork assholes stuffed inside other pork assholes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette
Despite living in Hong Kong and traveling frequently to Shenzhen at the time, I found out from a high school buddy from growing up in Ohio that lived in the USA and had no real connection to China besides this one business trip.
It appears someone who couldn't read english at all had used baidu translate to translate the menu. It turned out baidu translate was translating "扒饭" - assorted grilled meats - to my Twitter (HN, etc) username for YEARS.
https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/959749866036408320
Crazy world.
Lesson: if you can't read the language, blindly trusting translation is always a bit of a gamble!