Projects: Bar Menu

One of the more fun projects I have had was making an English version of a Japanese menu.

The menu was for a small bar in the town of Iwakuni. This city is about forty minutes away from the city of Hiroshima, and it has a large American marine base in it. So there are many English speaking foreigners in that town. The bar was "foreigner friendly" (I'll touch on that if people want to hear about it), and a place that I frequented quite a bit.

I was always fine with the Japanese menu, but if I came with other foreigners, they most likely used the English menu. The problem was that it was missing about half of the original. When I asked the owner, "yo what's up with your English menu?" He said, "I don't know how to translate the rest myself, and just left it like that." So, like any aspiring business owner, I offered my services... as a favor.

The Japanese version breaks up the mixed drinks, beers and hard liquors like an other menu. Also, the names of drinks are just about the same besides a few exceptions. For example, the names of shots, from vodka to Jägermeister are usually written in katakana. Same goes for whiskeys. Miscellaneous drinks such as shōchū, umeshu, sake, Irish coffee and wines go under "Sake." There were also a lot of cocktail mixes that went under a different category. I used the official names for particular cocktails, such as gimlet (gin/lime), cape cod (cranberry/vodka) and vodka buck (vodka/ginger ale), then added subtext for what it is. The bar owner ask me to put additional "American cocktails" in there. So I added things like Long Island ice tea.

One intricate part was with the food and high alcohol cocktails. Like any good bar, this one had crazy, unique, "what the hell did I drink last night?" kind of drinks. And of course, with them came daunting names. For example: 三途の川 (lit: River of Three Crossings) and 閻魔大王の涙 (lit: The Great Enma's Tears). I called those drinks Sanzu River and Yama’s Tears respectively. There is no particular need to translate them literally/perfectly. The patron only needs to know, "hey, that's probably a crazy drink." So I translated them in a way that comes off the tongue easily. Things that are a mouth full to say can be a turn off, so one needs to be careful in that respect when doing menus.

Left-New | Right-Japanese Menu

The food was similar. The Japanese menu had food items like "Great smelling garlic fried rice with a side fresh lettuce." It's not strange in Japanese but it needs to be condensed and "sound appetizing" in English. So I went with translations like "Aromatic Garlic Fried Rice and Fresh Greens."

After that, I had a good friend of mine come up with a good template and plug it in. Since this is a menu, the presentation, the layout, and keeping it condensed is very important. He was able to balance all of these and make a great template for the menu. Frankly, I think it's better than the original menu.

The reward

In the end the owner was very happy with his new menu and said that the foreign customers are able to order more easily. We didn't ask to be paid, but he insisted that he compensate us somehow.

If I was to do this sort of thing again, I would like to use better materials to make the menu itself look extremely classy. The menu we made looks nice, but it's made from items from a 100yen store. It all, of course, depends on what restaurant or bar I am doing it for though.


By the way, don't drink the Sanzu River. It's like half gin, half black coffee...