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> Physical menus are fine. They do the job. But if we're looking to actually improve upon them, current approaches miss the mark. They offer limited interactivi

> Physical menus are fine. They do the job. But if we're looking to actually improve upon them, current approaches miss the mark. They offer limited interactivity and flexibility. 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.

flextheruler 3y ago
Yeah I’m not sure which restaurants would use something like this maybe food trucks or casual places that already do the QR pdf menus. The menu is a huge portion of setting the ambience and theme of a nice restaurant.
- alwa 3y ago
  And beyond the setting and ambiance, it’s a huge portion of the restaurant’s value proposition: “Here are all the things we do and are proud of, what sounds best?” 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).”
- acdha 3y ago
  I think Animats has it right: this doesn’t make sense for almost any restaurant - even a place with a huge menu doesn’t have enough entries that a regular search engine wouldn’t be equivalent quality at orders of magnitude better cost & performance – but it could make sense for a company like Uber Eats or Yelp, and I think especially so if the language parsing could handle really imprecise queries across languages. 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.
SpaceL10n 3y ago
Being able to filter by allergen is pretty useful. A chain of custody for ingredients would be cool too. Of course, one can just ask. Does this have nuts in it? Was this ethically sourced? 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.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  You don’t need a language model for that, and arguably shouldn’t use one if there’s a possibility of the model hallucinating the wrong answer. And the model is only as good as the information it is given, so if there is allergen info available, why not just display it directly to the customer? If there’s not, your model will almost certainly be wrong.
- wyre 3y ago
  >Was this ethically sourced? If you’re at a restaurant and it is uncertain, the answer is likely no, purely based on the scale that restaurants require.
alwa 3y ago
You are not at all the only one. I don’t mean to diminish the project in TFA-it’s a cool application at a sensible scale. But your point resonates with a broader frustration of mine that’s percolated since COVID. 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?
- Aeolun 3y ago
  For a menu with a large number of small dishes (e.g. Sushi) I kind of like the tablet approach. You used to write numbers on a list and hand it to the waiter, but handling the large menus was very unwieldy. Now you just tap a few buttons on a tablet. 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.
  - bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
    Indeed, this is a retrieval task, not a recognition task.
boesboes 3y ago
I'm with you. I thought it was a joke at first
SeanAnderson 3y ago
Maybe eink screens will become cheap enough to dish out as dynamic restaurant menus in the future?
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  When everyone has a phone in their pocket, this would be a folly. 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.
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    There was an uptick in this behavior during covid in American restaurants, but everyone I know expressed dislike for it. I agree it's more practical, but I thought my suggestion was a nice way to hedge engrained customer expectations against a desire for digital advancements.
    - acdha 3y ago
      I think there’s also a basic QA issue. I use that heavily at places which have systems which are fast and reliable but most of the places which stopped had these terrible systems which wanted you to install their low-quality app which demanded lots of permissions and account creation, or seeming-parodies of modern web apps which needed 25mb of JavaScript to display a menu (not hyperbole - I checked one of them in WPT after being surprised by how bad it was). 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.
madaxe_again 3y ago
You aren’t alone, no, however an awful lot of people would be thrilled if they could walk into any restaurant, anywhere, and automatically have mac and cheese or whatever their preferred dish is delivered to them. The majority of humans aren’t adventurous, and prefer convenience and consistency, and not having to think.
all2 3y ago
For the same reason I prefer a well stocked physical library. University libraries tend to be the best for browsing. Something about walking slowly down an aisle and glancing over the spines of so many books. And maybe one catches your eye, or you just stop and arbitrarily decide that the Annals of Quantum Mechanics: Proceedings of the 1989 Convention, Vol II is the right book to pull out.
kredd 3y ago
Personally, I don’t care whether physical menu is available or not. But my smallest pet peeve is not having the online menu available, because sometimes they take the menu with them after placing the first bunch of orders, then I gotta ask for the menu again… then the dance continues.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Just say, as I do, "I'm going to hold onto one of these menus thanks :)". A normal human interaction.
  - kredd 3y ago
    Oh, I do! Sometimes the place is loud and it doesn’t get heard. Nothing wrong that a server or someone else did, but having it available on my phone is just a big convenience thing for me. 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.
anh690136 3y ago
Love the physical menu as well
candiddevmike 3y ago
The only improvement over physical menus would be an ingredients list IMO. As someone with food sensitivities, it's really, really annoying when a dish's description isn't inclusive of everything in it.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Even for that you could add an extra qr code at the end. 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)
dkasper 3y ago
I prefer the physical menu to look at but it is a huge convenience to use toast or similar apps to order on your phone and then pay whenever you’re ready to leave. No need to wait for the servers for who knows how long in a busy restaurant.
ofrzeta 3y ago
Surely you are not the only one. I hate going into a restaurant being forced to use my phone to read the menu. What the hell? Is printing menu cards that expensive? Also our kids can read but don't own phones yet.

flextheruler 3y ago

Yeah I’m not sure which restaurants would use something like this maybe food trucks or casual places that already do the QR pdf menus. The menu is a huge portion of setting the ambience and theme of a nice restaurant.

alwa 3y ago
And beyond the setting and ambiance, it’s a huge portion of the restaurant’s value proposition: “Here are all the things we do and are proud of, what sounds best?” 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).”
acdha 3y ago
I think Animats has it right: this doesn’t make sense for almost any restaurant - even a place with a huge menu doesn’t have enough entries that a regular search engine wouldn’t be equivalent quality at orders of magnitude better cost & performance – but it could make sense for a company like Uber Eats or Yelp, and I think especially so if the language parsing could handle really imprecise queries across languages. 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.

SpaceL10n 3y ago

Being able to filter by allergen is pretty useful. A chain of custody for ingredients would be cool too. Of course, one can just ask. Does this have nuts in it? Was this ethically sourced? 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.

janalsncm 3y ago
You don’t need a language model for that, and arguably shouldn’t use one if there’s a possibility of the model hallucinating the wrong answer. And the model is only as good as the information it is given, so if there is allergen info available, why not just display it directly to the customer? If there’s not, your model will almost certainly be wrong.
wyre 3y ago
>Was this ethically sourced? If you’re at a restaurant and it is uncertain, the answer is likely no, purely based on the scale that restaurants require.

alwa 3y ago

You are not at all the only one. I don’t mean to diminish the project in TFA-it’s a cool application at a sensible scale. But your point resonates with a broader frustration of mine that’s percolated since COVID. 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?

Aeolun 3y ago
For a menu with a large number of small dishes (e.g. Sushi) I kind of like the tablet approach. You used to write numbers on a list and hand it to the waiter, but handling the large menus was very unwieldy. Now you just tap a few buttons on a tablet. 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.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  Indeed, this is a retrieval task, not a recognition task.

boesboes 3y ago

I'm with you. I thought it was a joke at first

SeanAnderson 3y ago

Maybe eink screens will become cheap enough to dish out as dynamic restaurant menus in the future?

madaxe_again 3y ago
When everyone has a phone in their pocket, this would be a folly. 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.
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  There was an uptick in this behavior during covid in American restaurants, but everyone I know expressed dislike for it. I agree it's more practical, but I thought my suggestion was a nice way to hedge engrained customer expectations against a desire for digital advancements.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I think there’s also a basic QA issue. I use that heavily at places which have systems which are fast and reliable but most of the places which stopped had these terrible systems which wanted you to install their low-quality app which demanded lots of permissions and account creation, or seeming-parodies of modern web apps which needed 25mb of JavaScript to display a menu (not hyperbole - I checked one of them in WPT after being surprised by how bad it was). 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.

madaxe_again 3y ago

You aren’t alone, no, however an awful lot of people would be thrilled if they could walk into any restaurant, anywhere, and automatically have mac and cheese or whatever their preferred dish is delivered to them. The majority of humans aren’t adventurous, and prefer convenience and consistency, and not having to think.

all2 3y ago

For the same reason I prefer a well stocked physical library. University libraries tend to be the best for browsing. Something about walking slowly down an aisle and glancing over the spines of so many books. And maybe one catches your eye, or you just stop and arbitrarily decide that the Annals of Quantum Mechanics: Proceedings of the 1989 Convention, Vol II is the right book to pull out.

kredd 3y ago

Personally, I don’t care whether physical menu is available or not. But my smallest pet peeve is not having the online menu available, because sometimes they take the menu with them after placing the first bunch of orders, then I gotta ask for the menu again… then the dance continues.

mvdtnz 3y ago
Just say, as I do, "I'm going to hold onto one of these menus thanks :)". A normal human interaction.
- kredd 3y ago
  Oh, I do! Sometimes the place is loud and it doesn’t get heard. Nothing wrong that a server or someone else did, but having it available on my phone is just a big convenience thing for me. 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.

anh690136 3y ago

Love the physical menu as well

candiddevmike 3y ago

The only improvement over physical menus would be an ingredients list IMO. As someone with food sensitivities, it's really, really annoying when a dish's description isn't inclusive of everything in it.

lm28469 3y ago
Even for that you could add an extra qr code at the end. 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)

dkasper 3y ago

I prefer the physical menu to look at but it is a huge convenience to use toast or similar apps to order on your phone and then pay whenever you’re ready to leave. No need to wait for the servers for who knows how long in a busy restaurant.

ofrzeta 3y ago

Surely you are not the only one. I hate going into a restaurant being forced to use my phone to read the menu. What the hell? Is printing menu cards that expensive? Also our kids can read but don't own phones yet.