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Comment by rrwo | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse when you you don't have internet access, and have to use a restaurant WiFi that requires you to sign up.

Also, if you are dining with someone who has a food allergy, then all the "convenience" of online menusgoes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.

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> all the "convenience" of online menus goes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.

Which is silly because an online menu is an amazing opportunity to do extensive dietary restriction support. In fact, it's so accomodative to have a filter to narrow/highlight menu choices that I'm surprised restaurants haven't done that and also made "Paleo" and other diets part of it. Plus every single menu entry could have expansions to show exact ingredients, etc., for extra research.

Honestly, a lot of it seems to boil down to that digital menus can be superior to the traditional options, but a lot of places are kind of awful at software and websites so you get a wide spread of quality, a lot of which is hilariously inferior to paper.

That costs money, and some restaurants already struggle with higher costs and fewer customers.

That's a bit weird to me.

It's often the case in the UK that the mobile app/website in restaurants has full allergy information, including filters to only show items that match certain criteria.

Same. Not a fan of QR menus for plenty of reasons, but allergies isn't one of them.

Printed menus where I live (Seattle) tend to have the exact same info as the QR menus, which includes the allergen info. Which makes sense, because most of the time the QR menu is the exact same as the physical one (just printed out). And those that are not the same just have more info on the website, like full nutritional content and such.

My experience with some restaurants is that they don't.

The QR menu is just a PDF of the printed menu.

> their book of allergens to the table

Wow, they have book of allergens?

Is that with list of dushes from specific restoraunt? Or ith general reference book?

Never saw that in my country. I guess we don't use these. If you have allergy you are just screwed.

It's so common in the EU and UK that I think it's probably law, or a good way of complying with the law. It's specific to the restaurant's menu.

Some places will list the allergens directly on the menu, with symbols or footnotes. Less common is a separate menu showing only e.g. lactose free options -- I've seen this at nicer places in the UK.

Places like cafés and fast food where the menu is a blackboard or screen should have a book/file or similar. It is often just printed Word documents in a ringbinder, presumably prepared by the chef.

McDonald's example: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g18704... (just see the picture)

Ryanair in-flight menu example with symbols: https://www.foodsmatter.com/allergy_intolerance/management_t...

(Might _ua mean Ukraine? Then FWIW, I've seen this system in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland.)

Please let your server know of any allergies or food intolerances. Gluten-free options are available but our kitchen is not gluten-free. Delivery, tax, and document fees extra. Void where prohibited. All rights reserved.

That's as American as Uncle Sam himself.

right, dining with someone with allergies remains as inconvenient as usual.

And dining as someone with allergies is more inconvenient.

Well that also assumes you live in a part of the world that's civilized and has an allergy book. Seen it plenty in Europe and almost never in the US. Most of the time, in the US, if you say you have an allergy to something the waiter says "I don't know" or "I'll tell the chef".

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