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 searc

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.