Restaurant menu glossary: French, Dutch, English

In Belgium a single table can seat a French-speaking guest, a Dutch-speaking guest and an English-speaking tourist. Translating your menu is not a luxury — it is what lets each of them order what they actually want. Here is the vocabulary, family by family.

Menu sections

Cooking methods and preparations

The last four rows are the doneness scale for red meat, from rarest to most cooked: bleu, saignant, à point, bien cuit. This is the vocabulary guests most often get wrong across languages — a 'medium' ordered in English is not a 'bleu', and a steak sent back to the kitchen costs more than a translation.

Meat and cuts

Fish and seafood

Diets and allergens

The last fourteen rows are exactly the fourteen allergens made mandatory by EU regulation 1169/2011, in the order of its Annex II. In Belgium, the Royal Decree of 17 July 2014 allows that information to be given verbally, provided among other things that the procedure is written down and accessible to staff and to inspectors (Art. 4). Independently of that choice, its Article 5 requires two notices to be displayed where non-prepacked food is offered for sale: where the declaration can be found, and that the composition of the products may change. A menu carrying the allergens dish by dish can exempt you from them where the declaration is entered in a clearly apparent place and easily consulted before the purchase is concluded (Art. 5(3), point 1) — but where it is only reachable by scanning a code, keeping the notice up is the prudent position. Our allergen article covers that point, with the texts behind it.

Note: this article is informational and not legal advice. Check the display rules that apply in your country and region.

Drinks

The trap: translate once, then forget

Most translated menus are translated once, on the day they go to print. Then a dish changes, a price moves, a special appears — and only the French version gets updated. The other languages age in silence, and the Dutch-speaking guest orders something that no longer exists. That is exactly the problem a digital menu solves: all three versions live in one place and change together.