Food and translation safety
Built to help you ask the right question.
Eating well in an unfamiliar country often comes down to one short conversation with the person serving you. Bite China exists to make that conversation possible — to tell you what a dish usually is, flag what's worth checking, and hand you the words to check it.
What it can't do is see inside a particular kitchen. This page explains where that line falls, so you can use the app well.
If you have a serious allergy
Please treat Bite China as preparation for the conversation, not a replacement for it. Use it to narrow the menu and to say clearly what you can't eat — then confirm the dish with restaurant staff before you order. Recipes and kitchens vary, and only the people cooking can tell you what's really in the pan.
Where the limits are
What each part of the app can tell you — and what it can't.
Knowing this makes the app more useful, not less. Each one comes with the practical thing to do about it.
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Reading the menu from a photo
The app reads printed characters well in decent light. Handwritten specials, decorative fonts, glare and weathered boards are harder, and some lines may come back partial.
If a dish looks garbled, retake the photo closer or straighter — that fixes most cases.
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Translation for understanding
Translations are written to help you grasp what a dish is, not as a certified or legally binding rendering. Some names carry history or wordplay that no direct translation fully captures.
Where a name is misleading, we explain the dish rather than translate it literally.
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Dishes described as they usually are
Ingredients, cooking style and regional context describe the dish as it's commonly made. A specific restaurant may use a family recipe, a regional variation, or simply whatever's fresh.
Treat it as a well-informed expectation, not a promise about the plate in front of you.
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Dietary flags point you toward the question
Your preferences — lactose, peanut, vegetarian, no beef, no pork, gluten-free — surface a flag when a dish commonly involves them. They can't account for a kitchen's own substitutions, shared fryers, or cross-contact on a busy pass.
A flag means "ask about this," and an absent flag never means "confirmed safe."
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The kitchen has the final word
Everything above leads to the same place: a short, clear exchange with the people cooking your food. That's the one source that's actually authoritative.
The phrase cards were built for this — show the Chinese, or play it aloud.
Designed to support the conversation
Use the app to ask better questions.
Bite China's dining phrases are built for exactly this moment — confirming ingredients, flagging allergies and asking for changes, in Simplified Chinese, spoken or shown at the table.
See dining phrases →Have a question about how this works