At 1.40 on Tuesday 3 November 2026, the lunch rush at a family restaurant near Valencia’s Mercado Central was at its peak. A chalkboard by the door listed the menú del día at €14.50, written only in Spanish. Two visitors from Bristol pointed at a laminated photo menu with a peeling corner, then at the chalkboard, then back again. The server waited, smiled, and tapped something into a handheld. What arrived ten minutes later was close to what they’d wanted, which on a first day abroad counts as a good result.
Ordering food in a country where the language and the menu habits are unfamiliar is one of the small daily challenges of travel. Most meals work out fine. The ones that don’t tend to go wrong at the same point, somewhere between what a guest means to order and what the kitchen understands.
The journey from a guest choosing a dish to the kitchen preparing it involves more coordination than most diners realize, and restaurant ePOS platforms such as Tableview.com help connect those decisions with order management, payments, and the pace of daily service. For travelers, the useful part is knowing where that chain can break and what to do at the table to keep it intact.
Learn the Local Menu Habits
Every country has its own menu conventions, and knowing them before sitting down saves a lot of confusion. In Spain, the menú del día is a fixed-price weekday lunch, usually a starter and a main with bread and a drink or dessert included. In Portugal, bread, olives and small starters often arrive at the table unasked, and they’re charged if eaten (sending them back is perfectly normal). Italian bills often include a coperto, a per-person cover charge that should be listed on the menu. French restaurants frequently offer a formule, a set combination at a lower price than ordering each dish separately. None of these are tourist traps. They’re simply local habits that visitors meet for the first time at the till.
A few country notes worth keeping on a phone.
- Spain, where lunch is the main meal, and the menú del día is usually served only on weekdays.
- Portugal, where any unasked-for starters on the table can be politely refused before eating
- Italy, where asking to change a dish’s ingredients is less common than in the UK or the US, so ordering something close to what you want works better than making big changes.
- France, where steak doneness words differ, with saignant meaning rare, à point close to medium,m and bien cuit meaning well done
- Japan, where many ramen and noodle shops take orders through a ticket machine at the entrance
Getting the Order Across
Translating programmes have made foreign travel much easier. They make a quick English translation of a menu by taking a photograph, and you can then write down a short order and give it to the waiter on the screen, which is translated for you on the spot. A request like “no onion” can be readily translated into any language, but a long request for something special seldom is. Once they have the order, most restaurants have a programmed order-book, so that it goes straight to the kitchen, not just to a memory. This is more important than it seems, because an order that is written down carries far less risk of alteration.
Three habits make the biggest difference.
- Write any allergy or dietary need in the local language before the trip
- Ask the server to repeat the order back, since a quick check takes seconds and catches most misunderstandings
- Point at the dish name on the menu as well as saying it
The Pepperoni Problem
On a Saturday evening in November 2026, a couple from Leeds sat down in a pizzeria on Via dei Tribunali in Naples and ordered two “pepperoni” pizzas, as at home. The waitress nodded and took the order; twenty minutes later two pizzas arrived topped with sweet peppers instead of the expected salami. In Italian, “peperoni” means peppers, and the spicy salami is usually listed as salame piccante. The waitress immediately understood the confusion and sent a fresh order to the kitchen, this time with salami. They were made to wait a further fifteen minutes on a busy night and the first pizzas went back to the kitchen half eaten.
Plenty of travelers make that exact mistake every week in Naples.
In order to get away from this, one must order from the words on the menu, not by translating from the words of home. Menu translations and photos help, but the kitchen reads the local name.
QR Menus and Tablets at the Table
QR code menus are now common across Europe and Asia, and many offer an English version with photos. Some go further and let guests order and pay from their own phones, which removes the language barrier almost entirely. Behind them, restaurant ePOS systems pass the order straight to the kitchen, often with each dish already labeled in the kitchen’s language. In Seoul and Tokyo, tablets fixed to the table do the same job. Japan’s ticket machines are the older version of the idea. A guest picks a button with a picture, pays, and hands the ticket to the cook. Simple, and almost impossible to misunderstand.
- Use the QR menu’s language switch if there is one, then check the order summary before sending.
- Keep a printed menu request ready, because some places will still hand one over if the phone version is confusing.
Checking Before It Reaches the Kitchen
You can catch most ordering mistakes before the food is cooked. When a server repeats the order back, it shows what they’ve entered into the ePOS system for restaurant service, and that’s when you can correct anything. If a dish arrives looking different from what you expected, ask calmly before eating, because the kitchen can usually fix the problem quickly if nothing has been touched.
If you’re planning a trip, program a few key phrases into your mobile phone, including the names of food you’ll definitely order and any food you need to avoid.