"Just to name a few!" If you read English but not Chinese, only the tagline and the price are immediately intelligible. After a moment you might gather, since this sign stands outside a cafe, that it's a menu board, and by matching the price on the sign to the big red type in the window, you might then deduce that it names a list of lunch specials. A few of them, anyway.
Of course the menu board might spell out the bill of fare in English, too, or restrict itself to Chinese. Instead it offers an example of code-switching — a shift by a multilingual author or speaker between two or more languages, each expressed idiomatically rather than in translation — which in this context suggests a young, American-born staff. (I wouldn't expect such a sign in the eastern sprawl of Manhattan's Chinatown, for example, where many proprietors are recent immigrants from Fujian province and speak an English just as labored as my Mandarin.) Indeed, when I entered Kato Cafe, the countergals greeted me in an easy English, though perhaps for the sake of expediency they also offered a printed menu, fully translated, of Hong Kong-style light bites. After another visit, when I haven't just risen from a large group lunch, I'll have the appetite to offer you more particulars.
Kato Cafe
135-01 35th Ave. (at Farrington St.), Flushing, Queens
718-321-8818
