Tofu of the Speckled Old Woman Chen: Ways to Nominate an Original Dish of National Cuisine in the Menu of a Russian Restaurant

The article explores the menu of a restaurant specializing in regional cuisine, focusing primarily on the strategies for presenting dishes that are exotic to Russian gastronomic culture. With the growth of gastronomic tourism and interest in regional food traditions, the menu has become an important business tool, making its study a relevant task for linguistics. Observations and conclusions are drawn from the examples of the dish names from Sichuan cuisine, "Mp dufu," presented in the menus of restaurants in Russian cities. The article examines the history of the dish's name variants in the Chinese language; the competition between names derived from different Chinese culinary terms in Russian menus; the choice of transcription methods and the peculiarities of calquing the Chinese name; the pathways of grammatical assimilation of the exotic culinary name; forms of original Russian names that displace transcriptions and calques; and ways to present information about taste, composition of components, and methods of preparation. The research material consisted of 100 culinary names obtained through a random sampling method from Russian restaurant menus. Corpora data and results from an associative experiment were also used. The obtained data underwent lexicographic and discursive analysis. Specific dish names are rarely the subject of close analysis by linguists. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the nomination strategies for a single dish across various dining establishments for the first time. The authors conclude that menus are evolving from an informative speech genre to an evaluative one: alongside names that clarify spicy taste, type of preparation, and ingredient composition, menus widely employ transcriptions and calques that appeal directly to clients' emotional spheres and spark their curiosity. Modifications in the generic affiliation of the noun "tofu" and the name of the dish itself, as well as changes in word order that lead to components of the culinary name acquiring new lexical meanings, indicate the Russification of the name of the popular dish. On the other hand, the task of representing the original exotic dish leads to the choice of nomination strategies that hinder the assimilation of the borrowing.