"Tull" reads the sticker on the restaurant door. It's a promising start. At our table, the friendly waitress presents us with a Chinese and English menu offering a wide selection of hot drinks, including the intriguing "Ovaltion." Turning eagerly to the food pages, I breathe a sigh of relief as gems such as "Select Wing of Typhoon Shelter" and "Sleek Chicken" leap out at me. My fears of government interference in my dining pleasure have been entirely unfounded. Despite officials' efforts, there are still plenty of Beijing restaurants with wonderfully Chinglish-riddled menus.

In its latest bid to add a veneer of international sophistication to the capital's largely unpolished exterior, the municipal government has published a list of English translations for 1,000 common Chinese menu items. Goodbye "Sliver Crap," hello "Silver Carp." But wait just a moment there. "One thousand" common dishes? It's true that many Chinese menus are of Biblical proportions but still 1,000 dishes seem like a lot of things I have never eaten. Although I suppose for starters there must be many ways to cook the warty toad-like bullfrogs that lurk in many restaurant fish tanks. Deep-fried, poached or roasted whole in an MSG crust, no cooking method makes bullfrogs an acceptable foodstuff in my opinion, but don't let me hold you back.

The new menu translations have been online since the end of January this year, but standardizing anything in a city as vast as Beijing is no easy task. Especially since restaurant managers don't actually have to replace their expensive glossy menus with the officially sanctioned version. The translations are not compulsory; they are simply available for anyone interested in ridding their eatery of giggling foreigners. It's all to do with the ongoing and at times esoteric effort to "civilize" the city and its inhabitants ahead of--yes, here we go again--the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Don't worry, you will only have to read that particular group of words about 1,000 more times before August next year.

Surely, I'm not the only one who is relieved that these translations, which are part of the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program, are optional. Chinglish menus are one of the more endearing aspects of eating out in Beijing. It's nice to be reminded that I am eating "Chicken That Makes You Slobber" and not just spicy, bony chicken pieces drowned in oil and showered with monosodium glutamate. A shared chuckle over "Fried French Fries" or "Stirred Pig's Ear" can really break the ice at those awkward dinners with strangers, which are a staple of so many foreigners' social lives in Beijing.

I personally have never seen this, but China Daily reports "Tongziji" is translated as "Chicken Without a Sex Life" in some restaurants. Surely more than one first date has been enlivened with tasteful banter about that one. Better still, China Daily notes some people have suggested a more accurate translation would be "Rooster without a Sex Life." This seems to me to show a lack of imagination, but I guess English is not the writers' mother tongue. Any native English speaker would surely offer another word for rooster that is even more fitting.

This brings me to an interesting consideration. When I taught English in Japan, I sometimes asked my students to correct each others' English mistakes. Since all the students in any level of class were of very similar ability, almost without fail they replaced their classmates' errors with their own variations. You see my point? I wonder who was in charge of the mammoth task of translating and standardizing all 1,000-odd menu items. I only hope he or she is not a native English speaker.

Please don't take this the wrong way and start jumping up and down about how rude it is to poke at people who are trying to make life easier for foreigners in China. I know I have been on the receiving end of more than the odd chortle from restaurant staff as I drink the soup first, pour soy sauce on the wrong things, grapple ineptly with slippery jiaozi (dumplings), mispronounce everything and generally do my unwitting best to enhance the stereotype of the blundering foreigners at eateries across the city. It's all about social harmony. You amuse me, I amuse you, and everyone is happy.

Besides, even if the menu mentors do manage to catch up with all those "Kinds of Daily Tasteful Doubly Boiled Soups," they will never be able to edit the billboards trumpeting over-priced apartments in words I suspect are no less preposterous in the original Chinese. Or perhaps there actually are "landgents" out there who are even now pacing their faux wood panel floors in the "refined mansions of glorious prestige" near my apartment.

The writer is a New Zealander working in Beijing