The Pocket Menu Reader's introduction is a very good overview of German cuisine. The Where To Eat chapter include the many German terms for "restaurant" (Beisel, Café, Gasthaus, Gasthof, Gaststätte, Restaurant, usw.). Other sections include: National Dishes, Regional Dishes, Recipes, Food Shopping, Public Holidays, and Weights and Measures.

A minor complaint for American readers is the sometimes slightly odd language of a book that has been translated from Italian into British English (e.g., "book" a restaurant versus "make reservations"). All references to temperature (beer and wine serving, etc.) are in Celsius degrees, although the recipes do list both metric and English measurements. The 2000 edition that I reviewed also still has references only to marks and schillings, which have now been replaced by the euro.

Perhaps because the original was Italian and European, this German menu guide also omits details that would be helpful to North Americans: e.g., tipping customs and the common practice of seating yourself in most German restaurants. The author does, however, mention the common German practice of strangers sitting at your table if there are no other free tables.

But the Langenscheidt Menu Reader has many useful features and good information that make it well worth buying. It also lives up to its name by being compact enough to truly fit in a shirt pocket, while offering 1500 terms in German and English, with an alphabetical list of food dishes and culinary terms in both German to English and English to German. It can even replace many average German-English travel phrasebooks, since it includes phrases related to non-food areas such as the telephone, time, numbers, taxis, smoking, pronunciation, hotels, and standard greetings. But in the area of food, as one might expect, the Menu Reader offers comprehensive coverage of drinks, desserts, gastronomic terms, and German special dishes. And, if you like recipes, this phrasebook has a wide selection of recipes you can cook up at home.

Pocket Menu Reader Germany
German-English/English-German
Langenscheidt, 2000
Vinyl, 205 pages
$US7.95
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