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Rating: 
Summary: Try it
Review: Disclaimer: Jim McCawley [...]was a dear friend of mine, a great dinner companion and chooser of restaurants off the beaten track, and the advisor for the Linguistics dissertation I never wrote. I'm sorry this book is out of print, but glad to see what a used copy costs. Jim was a genius, passionate about language and food. If you've ever wondered what those characters on the Chinese menu mean, this is your Rosetta Stone. If you take this book seriously, you'll be able to order off the menu the Chinese customers get, not the skimpy English one. And if there's any justice in the world, this book will be reprinted someday.
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Summary: Nice to see it's back in print
Review: The most authentic entrees in a Chinese restaurant usually don't appear on the English menu. But how to decipher the Chinese menu? This book guides you through. This unique book is finally back in print.
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Summary: Wee kanji
Review: This book is an excellent idea: just enough background to understand and read the Chinese characters you're likely to encounter in restaurants. My only carp is that many of them are reproduced in such a small size in the main text that it's hard to see the details and thus impossible to effectively memorize them. A long glossary toward the back of the book makes up for this shortcoming to some extent by displaying the characters in a bigger size, but it's still an annoyance.
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Summary: insight into Chinese menus
Review: This is a practical introduction to reading Chinese menus. McCawley explains the structure of typical Chinese menus, a variety of culinary terms, and even the conventions for writing prices while taking the reader through several real menus. Additional sample menus, including handwritten menus with printed equivalents, are provided as examples. The book includes a substantial Chinese character dictionary focussing on words likely to be used in menus, using an indexing system that non-specialists will likely find relatively easy to use. My only criticism is that pronounciations are given in Mandarin, with Cantonese only occasionally provided. In spite of the recent influx of Mandarin speakers, the staff of Chinese restaurants in North America are still likely to speak Cantonese.
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Summary: Excellent system for reading Chinese menus
Review: To really eat well in good Chinese restaurants, you need to be able to understand the Chinese-language menu: many dishes aren't included on the English menu, and many dishes are described vaguely in English, but precisely in Chinese. Understanding the Chinese menu presents two great challenges: 1) looking up characters in an ordinary Chinese-English dictionary is very hard; 2) words have special meanings in a cooking context. McCawley's Guide is a great help on both counts. His indexing scheme works directly off the appearance of the character. Conventional dictionaries rely on the character's 'radical' -- which is often not obvious and hard to recognize -- and how it is written. The definitions here are strictly geared to cooking and eating, and often include the names of dishes (not just ingredients or cooking methods), so you know exactly what is on the menu. Still, you can't count on understanding a full menu quickly enough to stave off hunger -- a good idea to take one home for study if you can.
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Summary: Eating in Chinese
Review: When I was living in Taiwan this book was a lifesaver. I was teaching at a small university near Taipei in the early 80's. The only source of food was from the tiny restaurants that surrounded the side gate of the university. But to order I had to read the menus in Chinese! Luckily, I had brought McCawley's book with me, and was saved from starvation. The book has similar salutory value in American Chinese restaurants. Peter Cole
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