Apart from alcoholic beverages…
On my first weekend alone in The Netherlands in the Fall of 1997, I took the morning train to Utrecht and just started wandering around that medieval city. I walked a lot, and I was pretty far from the train station when it inevitably started to rain. When the rain got too heavy to ignore I ducked into a neighborhood café. But it looked like I picked the one place in NL where English was not spoken regularly. The menu I got had no English aids; no one in the place was speaking English, and the waitress was coming over to take my order. So I glanced around and saw a signboard: “Chile 3.50” (which I knew was priced in guilders, and seemed a reasonable price).
So I confidently pointed to the signboard and asked the waitress for “a bowl of chile, alstublieft”. (I knew the Dutch word for ‘please’, anyway – which is also the word for ‘you’re welcome’, in case you need to know that someday.) She seemed confused. So I made the bowl shape with my hands, mimed a spoon, smiled and just said, “Chile, alstublieft.”
She cocked her head, pointed to the signboard, and explained to me in passable English, “Sir, that’s wine.”
So I went back to the menu and picked out something that I thought I could recognize as “baked fish”, and ordered that. What I got then was three whole baked fishes – baked with fruit where their vital organs would have been. It kind of flummoxed me at first, but it was surprisingly good. I’d recommend the baked fish with fruit if you ever go to that place.