Sigh. Am I the only one who likes to hold a physical menu and browse it? I never go into a restaurant knowing what I’m gonna get… I like to see how the menu is themed and decide from there. The UI on a physical menu is a vast improvement over any digital menu I’ve seen.
Dining out is a human experience, and I deeply resent any systems that demand my attention be funneled away from my dining companions and staff, into a wholly inadequate digital kludge. There should never be a reason for an electronic device to be at the dinner table.
QR-code-based menus are absolutely and uniformly unfit for purpose. It’s a question of information and navigation: it’s intuitive and natural to navigate the physical layout of a printed menu, associated as it is with the stages of the meal and complete detail of all options at once. As you point out, I’m going into the menu not with the intention of seeking a specific taste I have in mind, but with the intention of hearing the full range of the restaurant’s proposition and recognizing what resonates with me. It’s a recognition task more than a retrieval task.
Compare to tapping and swiping through tabs full of pages of digital listings to remember what you meant to order when the time comes.
I admire the creativity and technical effort involved with this project, but I can’t imagine anything worse than having to play a guessing game with an LLM to hide-and-seek what the kitchen serves.
I feel like the whole enterprise understands the value of hospitality differently than I do: a human hospitality professional can apply the full range of their judgment, context, intuition, and humanity to something like this type of menu recommendation. And a skilled menu designer can provide an efficient survey of what’s on order and set the tone. Even in its ideal implementation, what problem does this AI-ification actually attempt to solve or add value to?
I can’t imagine how you’d factor AI into that though. Ultimately I generally know what I want, and writing a story about it isn’t going to help.
- the tablet is provided by the restaurant and knows your table number, etc - doesn't require registration or personal information - isn't used for payment
The only reason online menus are taking off is cost reduction and the fact that they can change the menu more easily (and the prices of course)
The menu is a huge portion of setting the ambience and theme of a nice restaurant.
At the risk of being extra curmudgeonly, have you ever dined someplace where they wheel a dessert cart round? There’s kind of a lightweight vicarious thrill you get just from eyeing the physical tantalizing plates, even if you don’t end up eating one.
Compare that to “here’s an empty text box. Whisper your very specific wishes to the genie and maybe it’ll materialize something in the neighborhood of your demand, probably not exactly what you asked for; and it’ll hide all the cool stuff we do that isn’t directly relevant to the demand we made you work to formulate (and probably can’t fill exactly).”
Based on my dinner earlier, a good example would be if you could take “who has that Ethiopian dish with chicken and bits of bread” and return a place listing only “Doro fitfit”, which would require more effort with a traditional search engine since none of those words are commonly present in the menu and you have to have more than basic Solr-style synonym expansion to expand “Doro” to “Doro wat”, which itself expands to “chicken stew”, and expand “fitfit” to “shredded injera”, which expands to “a type of bread”. Obviously that _could_ be solved with the traditional stack but that starts to get more involved so I could see an advantage for making it smoother.
The majority of humans aren’t adventurous, and prefer convenience and consistency, and not having to think.
Other thing is, when the menu isn’t available, there’s a decent chance I won’t even go there when I’m craving something specific. Like — I’m craving wings, but not every pub near me has it, so I do a very quick check before I go there.
But, to your point, the nuance that some chefs place in their food descriptions tells a lot. Only a human can tell you which pairings are important to a particular dish, a machine can't. A bit of both would be nice.
If you’re at a restaurant and it is uncertain, the answer is likely no, purely based on the scale that restaurants require.
In Malaysia, it’s common for the menu to be entirely digital - you scan a qr code, and you’re then presented with the menu, from which you then order and often pay directly on your phone. Some places remember who you are and show your previously ordered dishes at the top of the menu.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of restaurants drew the conclusion that customers don’t want online ordering rather than that customers want fast and smooth ordering. I suspect some of that was also unrealistic expectations from the ad-tech industrial complex promising additional revenue from things customers don’t want, too, based on how aggressively some of those pushed you to create accounts and allow tracking before you could order anything. Someone not blinded by greed would make the pitch to do that kind of thing after ordering when you’re not trying to do something else and have an idea about whether you’ll even want to come back.