Cantonese Dish Name Guide
Fifty-six Cantonese dishes with Jyutping, the English name used on Hong Kong menus, the literal meaning, and how to order them at a tea house.
Cantonese menus keep their own English names: har gow, siu mai, char siu, chow fun. They are not translations of the Chinese name but the names Hong Kong has used for a century. This guide lists 56 dishes with Jyutping, the menu English, what the name literally says, and the one detail worth knowing before you order.
Search the Cantonese menu
Type Chinese, Jyutping without tone numbers, or the English name.
Three rules of yum cha
The ordering system is not on the menu; it is on the table.
"One pot, two pieces" (jat zung loeng gin) is the traditional minimum: one pot of tea and two dim sum. Order more as the baskets arrive.
Your dim sum card is stamped or marked for every basket. Keep it on the table — it is how the bill is calculated.
A per-person tea charge (caa wai) is normal and appears separately on the bill. It is not a tip.
Reading Jyutping
Jyutping is the romanisation used in Hong Kong. Six tones; the numbers in dictionaries mark them.
Initials are close to English, with two traps: "c" is "ts" as in cats, and "z" is "ts" without the puff. So "caa" is cha, and "zai" is tsai.
Final "-aa" is a long ah, "-a" is a short uh. "Gaau" (dumpling) has a long vowel; "gai" (chicken) does not. Tone numbers are dropped in this guide.
Why the English name is not a translation
Har gow, siu mai and char siu entered English through Hong Kong, so they keep their Cantonese sound. A mainland menu may call the same dumpling xia jiao, but a Hong Kong menu will not.
When a Cantonese name is descriptive, the English usually is too: "sai joeng coi bou saang jyu" becomes watercress and snakehead soup. When the name is a technique — "ze ze" for a sizzling claypot — the English describes the sound, not the recipe.