Rubbery menu!

Eating in Kansai Just Got Easier

OHow frustrating is it when the only items you can order on the menu are the ones with pictures next to them? How embarrassing is it to have to walk outside and point to your food in a window like a little puppy begging for scraps? How maddening is it to speak Japanese, only to have the waitress blankly stare at you as if you’re speaking Dutch and then later bring you a glass of milk when you clearly said nama biru?! Consider your pain officially felt.

Because those days are coming to an end. Or at least some of them are. Now, as Kansai residents, we have Certified Perfect English Menu. By visiting www.engmenu.com we can now find more than 100 restaurants (and growing) in Kansai that feature English menus.

But these aren’t just you’re run of the mill, butchered “Jenglish” menus. All of the restaurants listed on engmenu.com offer menus that have either been translated or edited by native English speakers and writers. So, not only can you read them, you can actually understand them! And if you go to one of the site’s listed restaurants and find that you can’t understand the menu, Certified Perfect English Menu provides a complaints email account so you can respond and they can get it fixed.

All of the listings on engmenu.com contain the name, cuisine type, address, hours, contact information, map, and link to the restaurant’s site (if it’s in English). But some listings also offer content like coupons, downloadable menus, maps and images. The restaurants on the site can easily be searched by city; currently Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto are the categories. Cuisine, price, and special features such as hotel restaurants, family-friendly or romantic are also search options. There’s talk of expansion, too: according to the site’s founders, they will start adding Tokyo restaurants this fall.

Co-founder Seiko Matsuda describes Certified Perfect English Menu as an advocate for restaurants as much as a tool for foreigners, “Our goal is to bring Japan’s exceptional dining legacy to a larger audience. This site is going to make life easier and more fun for Japan’s foreign residents. And, it’s going to open a up a whole new world of dining choices for tourists, which is really needed.”

On top of being a great online reference, Certified Perfect English Menu also provides all of its associated restaurants with bright red stickers so that they can display their status for our convenience. Be on the search for these stickers on sandwich boards or in windows next to the ultra-realistic, pretty food models –that you will soon no longer need to point at!

You can find Certified Perfect English Menu at www.engmenu.com, as well as on Twitter @engmenu.