Welcome to the Menufy Blog
A quick introduction to what we'll be writing about — and why translating menus deserves more than a passing thought.
If you've ever stared at a menu in a language you can't read and just pointed at something hoping for the best — this blog is for you.
We built Menufy because every traveller has been there. You walk into a restaurant in Tokyo, Rome, or Bangkok, you sit down, you open the menu… and you have no idea what anything is. Sometimes there's a picture. Sometimes there isn't. You guess. And sometimes you guess wrong.
What you'll find here
Over the next few months we'll publish guides, deep dives, and short answers to the questions travellers actually ask:
- Country-specific menu guides — what to expect in Japan, Italy, France, Spain, Thailand, Korea and beyond.
- Practical how-tos — translating menus with your phone, decoding handwritten specials, asking about allergens in another language.
- The food itself — what dishes really mean once you cut through the translation, and what's worth ordering.
- App vs app — honest comparisons of the tools available for menu translation, including ours.
Why menu translation is harder than it looks
Translation apps that work fine for street signs often fall apart on menus. Restaurant menus are full of:
- Regional dish names that don't appear in dictionaries
- Words borrowed from other languages (French terms in Italian menus, Japanese terms in Korean menus)
- Handwritten specials with non-standard fonts
- Local slang for cuts of meat, cooking methods and portion sizes
That's the gap Menufy was built to close — and it's also what most of these posts will be about.
If you have a topic you'd like us to cover, send it our way. And if you haven't already — point your camera at the next foreign menu you see and let Menufy do the reading.