Clue #3: Speaks Some Mandarin

• In a January 27, 2006, post on his blog, the Ulterior Epicure provided tips from Chinese-language menus in Kansas City, offered phonetic spellings of menu items (along with a criticism of pinyin: "quite frankly, its method has never made sense to me - for instance, why use 'x' to produce a 'sh' sound when you could simply just use 'sh?'"), and observed that a participant in the comments was using "Cantonese pronunciations."

• In an eGullet thread in June of 2006, Kent Wang corrected the Ulterior Epicure's spelling of kao fu, to which the Ulterior Epicure replied, "Thanks Kent... for someone who's never learned pinyin, I 'spell by ear,' if you will."

• In a comment thread below a Flickr photo the Ulterior Epicure uploaded on September 3, 2006, the Ulterior Epicure revealed that "What little I know of the Chinese language is largely in the pinyin realm, so anything that looks vaguely different I assume to be Cantonese in origin."