east village idiot

This Week in Restaurant Misspellings

February 27, 2008 – 9:54 am

There appears to be a rash of misspellings outside East Village eateries. Just in the past two days, I’ve caught these two very obvious errors in my neighborhood.

The top one is at a Middle Eastern & Indian take-out joint on 1st Avenue. It reads, “Wellcome in Medina Indian Food Lunch Special $4.99” I’d call them out on misspelling a simple word like “welcome” and misuse of a preposition, but perhaps this sign is just missing some punctuation. “Well, come in, Medina! Indian Food Lunch Special, $4.99.” See? That works perfectly. But I’m not sure who Medina is.

The bottom one is at the venerable B&H Restaurant on 2nd Avenue. It reads “B&H Special 7-11AM Breakfast $425 Eggs, Chalabred Juice, Coffeeorte a Pancakes.” You’ve got some serious issues if you can’t spell “bread” correctly. And Challah is also missing a couple of letters. Look, I understand that you’ve got limited space, but I think that most New Yorkers would know what you mean by just putting “Challah” instead of “Chalabred.” Considering how good their Challah is, I wonder how their Chalabred Juice tastes. B&H scores bonus points for the random listing of pancakes and the abundance of commas on this sign.

One can only wonder how long these errors will go on before someone catches them. At least in both cases, the menus speak for the restaurant long before the signs will.