Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator (2015)

brooklynbarmenus.com

159 pointsm_a_g76 comments

As an inhabitant of Brooklyn, this is pretty funny and spot on. My only criticism is that the prices are too low. Some of the prices are fine, but the upper bound should be increased to the low 20's.

Yep... "monkfish souffle with natural clam & kraut puree" is minimum $32.

My favorite was "Vinegar $8" as an appetizer? Or maybe it was a cocktail. Either way, someone on Vanderbilt St would sell that to me (and I'd buy it just because I'd want to tell my friends I bought a vinegar drink).

In case you would like to tell your friends that, some cocktail bars will make you a shrub.

In Taiwan I had a drink made of sour plum vinegar and soda water. Absolutely delicious and refreshing on a hot day! So good I bought a bottle of the vinegar to take home.

Maybe you mean Vanderbilt Ave? Vanderbilt St has no commercial zoning.

What many people don't know is that 3 of the pricier restaurants on Vanderbilt Ave are all actually the same restaurant group. Their background is partially the 3-Michelin star Alinea in Chicago via chef Greg Baxtrom. Olmsted was first, then came Maison Yaki, and then Patti Ann's.

Olmsted is mostly very good (started great, then got bad during part of the pandemic, now is improving again), but you can still joke about being sold $8 vinegar from them for sure, haha. However, since "midwestern" cuisine is now becoming somewhat trendy, jokes about expensive port wine cheese balls at Patti Ann's ($12) may be more appropriate.

I live 2 blocks away from Zaytoons on Vanderbit and got the name wrong. I now have deep Brooklyn shame..

Those places are really nice, but so busy. Hard to just walk in and get a table.

That street has really changed in the past 5 years. I really like the semi-new Indian place next to Bicycle Habitat. I don't know why they sell bagels and pizza, but their Indian food is pretty good.

Plus the summer streets are nice. Really give it a neighborhood vibe.

Hello from slightly further south on Vanderbilt Ave :) I haven't tried that Indian place yet, but it's on my list, now. The pizza and bagels threw me off (not because "Indian == bad bagels/pizza", but because "somewhat random assortment of foods" is sometimes a red flag).

Not just the choice of food, but the decor inside looks like it was thrown together with spares from other restaurants. But, the food is good. Just as good as Joy Indian on Flatbush. Try their chicken jalfrezi - its delish.

Was this comment generated by the same generator? :D

Gushing about the credentials and pedigree of a particular restaurant and bar is also very Brooklyn

First, let's replace "gushing" with "discussing", because that's what was happening. I'm not sure "got bad during part of the pandemic, now is improving again" counts as gushing.

In what way is caring about your local food options in your immediate neighborhood, on the street you live, where your friends and acquaintances eat, drink, and work "very Brooklyn"? I guess if you live somewhere that restaurants just appear and have faceless owners with employees you'll never know, this isn't a thing. This is something discussed by really anyone who is interested food and restaurants in their area all over the world. If you like what a person did at one restaurant, you may like what they do with a new one. Or, maybe it's noteworthy when only the first one is great, and the subsequent ones are mediocre.

Has the Juicy Lucy migrated east yet?

Wow that’s cheap. At the Animal and the Instrument, vinegar was $17.

You can get vinegar in some fine dining as digestive, usually served in thin tall glasses. It's good for your stomach.

The idea with what I call "bend-over-just-over-double pricing strategy" is to figure out the ceiling price of a menu item and double it. It allows the patrons to feel like they are in the right place.

"salt $12"

yup, def low.

I got: Free Range Salt :-)

Organic salt.

I got market salt. I suspect it's been licked by a cow at some point.

It's not even really satire, from an actual menu:

   Pumpkin Hummus 15
   Vegetarian 'Spaghetti & Meatballs' 20
   Brownie Batter In A Jar 11

Someone needs to create a test to see if humans can reliably distinguish real and fake bar menus.

[1] https://www.boultonandwattnyc.com/food

That's from Manhattan, not Brooklyn, but maybe close enough

Agreed. The pricing is set such that they're able to get about say $125 from each patron. For those who try to game the system, for example sticking to just the bites, that is also fine. They will make sure there is no way to leave without handing minimal ~$50 by the end. That might not sound like much, but said patron got a union beer and some spam chunks which costs roughly nothing. In fact, that is preferred. Give us $50 and gtfo!

GRANITE & KNIGHT

frightened lamb with artisanal bison 8

chorizo discs with country rice bombs & market bay leaf 8

water 15

Seems about right.

I mean, this is kinda funny and plausible, but also I absolutely loved the food at most of those types of places in Brooklyn, really only 50% more expensive than ihop for meals that have 5x as many ingredients.

I think you underestimate how many ingredients are in IHOP food

(Edit) to wit: https://m.nutritionix.com/ihop/3-original-buttermilk-pancake...

Yeah usually the more expensive the food the fewer ingredients (and more identifiable).

Of course when you get down to CMOT’s sausages they’re back to one ingredient - “meat”.

This, whatever, New American cuisine is indeed often pretty good despite the sense of how impressed with themselves the restauranteurs are. There’s a pretty good indicator that the worst of this food is often the most interested in style, though it can be hard to separate passion and attention to detail from desire to put on a show.

Loved this from one dish on mine:

> expanded anchovy reduction

This is how I will now refer to every ingredient I do not doctor in a recipe.

Mine was activated (sardines, not almonds) - I’m pretty sure I only want activated ingredients from now on.

That feel when sardines not activated

If your sardine remains activated you may want to consult a doctor.

Or an exorcist.

Wow nice approach. Algo and the dataset in: https://www.brooklynbarmenus.com/js/scripts.js

I'll be submitting this to my local office for tomorrow's lunch. We use a shared Google sheet for ordering, should be pretty amusing to see who doesn't get the joke.

Please report back. Make sure it has at least a couple absolutely absurd items otherwise it's not funny.

That's quite a back-button trap. Not infinite, just equal to forward navigation (which would be fine if each click of the back button did something visible).

I was on a date and suggested we go to this ___ & ___ place that I hate that thought she might like it. She replied like "Eh places with an ampersand? Let's not". I thought I was the only one who knew that. The ONLY exception is Smart & Final.

I have no proof that this submission was inspired by this comment [0] but the strong possibility (conceived by me having stumbled across both) is remarkable.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/zw3g9d/what_food...

I had the same thought!

Implied is: the portions are small, the food isn’t very good, the service is mediocre or bad.

I never lived in NY but I lived in Sydney and there was a neighborhood by the beach called Bondi which was likely very similar to Brooklyn (yuppies, hipsters) and they had an amazing YouTube channel called Bondi Hipsters that satirized all the fads so perfectly.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4n6OVoyYQ

There’s a set of sushi restaurants in NYC called Bondi Sushi, maybe related?

Also the original iMac was Bondi Blue, named for beach (or rather sea by the beach)

Brooklyn… or anywhere

If the bar needs fake books, please point them to https://hipsum.co for hipster generated content. Pabst.

I always have hard time understanding menus in English and imagining how on earth it will look like, or what it is even. This is a proof that nothing is wrong with me.

I saw this yesterday on /r/AskReddit and bookmarked it too. I am wondering if there is a Parisian hipster version.

Someone needs to make an Austin variant...

Vegan Double Cheeseburger house-made with portobello, walnut, beet, lettuce, pickled onion, organic tomato, vegan cheddar, jalapeño remoulade, flaxseed bun (890 cal)... $17.5

I’m not seeing “local” or “farm-fresh” - gonna have to knock a buck off.

The truly funny thing about that is it is a real food menu item and description I cherry picked from a local restaurant. No creativity on my end required.

890 calories for a vegan burger before any fries or anything is quite impressive

Agreed, but it honestly still tastes kinda funny compared to a "real burger," having tried it before. If I was going to go full "vegan" I would personally avoid anything pretending to be a burger at a minimum, with the exception of maybe an "Impossible Burger" every now and then if I got a craving as it comes somewhat close. I honestly wouldn't even try going anything close to vegan as a whole until lab-grown meat becomes a real, mass produced, phenomenon. Even then, though, it's hard to say if that would still truly be considered "vegan."

Honestly, even as a meat eater I think a good bean burger tastes better than 90% of those "fake meat" burgers. The long time vegetarians I know were annoyed when restaurants started replacing vegetarian food for vegetarians with vegetarian food for "new vegetarians" and flexatarians.

Yeah, I’ve had amazing portobello based dishes that aren’t trying to be something else and they’re great.

Finally, the proof that artificial intelligence can replace the most sophisticated jobs around!

Bloody brilliant! Thank you!

> market sunflower with distressed fig & free-range anchovy sliders 9

Not for me

The real trick is these could all just be weirdly named cocktails

`PEACH & FOLK HAM SPREAD 8` sold

Miniature Acorn - $11

This is would be at least $18

I got "Acorn - $15" which gave me a good chuckle

Butter —- $13

Lol

You can use ChatGPT to get the recipes for these:

------

spicy marrow & sea-salt farfalle bun

Ingredients:

1/2 cup bone marrow, chopped

1/4 tsp chili flakes

1/4 tsp sea salt

4 farfalle buns

Instructions:

Preheat your grill or broiler to high heat.

In a small bowl, mix together the bone marrow, chili flakes, and sea salt.

Split the farfalle buns in half and spread the bone marrow mixture on the cut side of each bun.

Grill or broil the buns for 2-3 minutes, or until the bone marrow is melted and the buns are toasty.

Serve the buns warm, with any additional toppings of your choice (such as arugula or tomato slices).

------

fingerling ramp & blistered corn discs

Ingredients:

1 cup fingerling ramps (or green onions), trimmed and chopped

1 cup fresh corn kernels

4 plums, pitted and quartered 1 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp salt 1 tsp black pepper 2 tbsp butter 1 tbsp honey Instructions:

Preheat your grill to medium-high heat.

In a small bowl, mix together the olive oil, salt, and black pepper. Brush this mixture over the plums and set aside.

In a separate small bowl, mix together the butter and honey. Set aside.

On a grill-safe pan, place the fingerling ramps and corn kernels in a single layer. Grill for 3-4 minutes, or until the ramps are slightly wilted and the corn is starting to blister. Remove the pan from the grill.

Place the plums on the grill, skin side down. Grill for 2-3 minutes, or until the plums are tender and slightly caramelized.

Remove the plums from the grill and brush with the honey butter mixture.

To serve, place the grilled plums on top of the grilled ramps and corn. Serve hot and enjoy!

These sound crazy enough to work! Assuming you can work out what exactly is a "farfalle bun".

To me these show what is lacking in ChatGPT. In college (like 12 years ago) we all had to make a text markov chain generator. The result were sentences which were grammatically correct but meaningless and random (He went to the library and saw a golden goat). I sorta feel like like Chat GPT is doing that but with more ability to weight on higher level structure and weight on patterns in outside text. But these obviously are not real recipes and wouldnt work in real life. There's still not logic. It just seems like like better markov chain text generation.

A few years before that when I was in school we had the MIT fake paper generator (unfortunately no longer maintained). It used context free grammar to generate something similar, linking academic CS terms together to write nonsense conference papers.

You're right, modern language models are the same. They are more polished but still just as stupid. They don't understand anything, they just put a pattern together mechanically.

Personally I like systema like in the article posted here better, because they have a funny "mad-lib" quality instead of the low-quality blog content style of language models. It seems like where the language models can be more funny is in imitating a person's writing style

(I also wish we had an HN norm against copying chatgpt output into posts unless it's specifically an article about chatgpt.)

Maybe I am not a great cook (I thought I was decent though) but these recipes look totally plausible and normal, even if not the best recipe you’ve ever seen. They don’t look like gibberish markov chains to me. The ingredients are prepared appropriately

(I know a farfalle bun is a non sequitur but that was given as input- not provided by ChatGPT)

If you gave the name to the chef they’d wonder wtf somebody was doing mixing pasta and bone marrow and putting it in a bun.

Putting pasta into a sandwich makes slightly more sense than making a bun out of a specific pasta shape and I guess that’s missing from the model, but really it did a decent enough job here.

I don’t know when we’ll be at a place where if you ask a model for something and it comes back and tells you no and why that’s a dumb suggestion.

There’s no pasta in the ChatGPT recipe, it’s a “farfalle bun” (which we can assume is some type of pasta-inspired bun) with marrow in it. There is no pasta separate from the bun which gets put in the bun

They may be individually prepared appropriately but that is just because it copies other recipe texts. Perhaps it could be used to generate new ideas but so could a random recipe generator that picks three different cocktail ingredients and tells you to mix them. I'm not sure how this is any different than that, other than presentation.

Presumably actual recipes you see in a cookbook written by a person have been made in real life and the person could vouch for their quality or ease of making.

>it copies other recipe texts.

What human made recipe doesn’t?

Those seem reasonable. The recipe name is absurd so by necessity the recipes are. If you asked a chef to make a recipe for those dish names and they didn’t just ignore the name, it’d probably be similar.

It literally is just a better markov chain generator.

I've cooked recipes from ChatGPT before. They worked, but were somewhat mediocre. It looks like these would too.

Nothing about this says Brooklyn to me other than being sort of hipsterish I guess.

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