How do I order when I can't read the menu?
Short answer
Scan it. The translation tool built into Alipay turns a Chinese menu into English on the spot — the same app you already set up for paying.
The tool is already in your pocket
Shanghai's own visitor guidance walks through it: open the Easy Go service page inside the Alipay app, scan the menu with the built-in translation tool, and read the English version off your screen.
That matters because Alipay is the app most visitors have already configured for payment. The menu problem and the paying problem turn out to share one solution, which is the phone you are holding.
The menu often helps you anyway
Chinese menus lean heavily on photographs, and pointing at one is a complete, dignified act of ordering — staff see it every day. Where there are no photos, the wall of dishes on other tables works the same way.
Chain restaurants and anywhere younger increasingly run ordering through a QR code at the table, where the interface sometimes carries its own English toggle. The scan-translate trick covers the ones that do not.
A small strategy for the first days
Learn to recognise a handful of characters that matter to you — beef, chicken, spicy — and the menu stops being a wall of noise even before translation. The tool then confirms rather than decodes.
If a dish arrives that you did not intend, treat it as the tax on the method and eat the interesting mistake. The system here rewards experimenting more than it punishes it.
Good to know
- The Alipay you set up for paying also translates menus — Easy Go, then scan
- Pointing at photos or other tables' dishes is normal ordering, not a failure
- Table-QR ordering sometimes has an English toggle — look before scanning the menu
