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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 porti

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.

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.