Its All Greek to Me in China

A few evenings ago I biked into downtown Jimei with another American professor to pick up some groceries. We decided to find a restaurant to have dinnner first and my friend wanted to try a small place purporting to be a Greek restaurant. At the least the sign had the word "Greek" prominently displayed as shown in the picure below. I was sceptical since there probably aren't any Greeks around here and local Chinese wouldn't be likely to know much about Greek food. Nevertheless, the place looked clean and decent so I was willing to give it a try.

Greek restaurant that serves only Chinese food

Of course, the menu was all in Chinese and there were no pictures of the dishes (as some restaruants here have) so we had to order based on my limited Chinese reading skills - I can read enough to determine what kind of food it is - meat (肉), fish (鱼), soup (汤), noodles (面), etc., but not too much more than that. Menus can be especially difficult because Chinese names for dishes can sometimes be very creative rather than descriptive of what the food actually is.

After talking with the waitress, who spoke no English, but did give me a simple explanation of the types of food they had, I became certain there was nothing remotely Greek on the menu of this allegedly Greek restaurant. As with many things in China, what you see is not always what you get and often has nothing whatsoever to do with what you get. Nevertheless, we ordered some Chinese food which, although not the slightest bit Greek, was pretty tasty.

Authentic Greek food in China