Which menu in a restaurant/cafe do you prefer?

@ikarov I hope this is an open enough secret for most people but a lot lot lot of Chinese restaurants, particularly in smaller-to-mid-sized American cities but this is also true for places in LA and NY, that outwardly sells "Americanized" Chinese food and are family owned, have second menus that either are told verbally or printed separately for patrons who make it known to the waitstaff that they are Chinese and would like something more authentic. Since I've literally been in restaurants that do this from Vermont and New Hampshire to Washington State to Brooklyn and Boston to LA suburbs and Montreal to boot I'm guessing this is more or less universal in North America. However I don't think there's any real way to get access to it without a member of your party actually speaking Chinese (Mandarin always works, I don't speak Cantonese but it appears to work most of the time). The thing is that the secret menus are always disconnected entirely from what the restaurant serves usually and usually represents some sort of regional cuisine from China that you'd have a hard time even finding a restaurant for outside of NY/LA/Seattle/SF in my experience. Much like how immigrant communities frequently exist completely illegibly and in parallel to the hegemonic mainstream society, it is apparently also the dynamic in the microcosm of restaurants. Got some really unexpectedly great food in some very out of the way places this way, just make sure you bring someone who speaks the language if you don't.

@jim_zhou got it, very interesting 👍