At a small restaurant in Tennessee, USA.
I don’t like that they asked an LLM to graphic design the entire menu, but why in the name of robot jesus did they look at the result and say “great. Love it. Print 100 copies.”
The food pictures made me physically ill. They’re really upsetting! I told the Waitress, who agreed that the pics were awful, and the manager/owner(?) who didn’t seem to care.
There are LLM inconsistencies all over, too, like icons changing from page to page.
The power move was to tell the manager, and then leave afterwards without ordering anything.
Let them see the direct consequences of their actions, money walking out the door.
Even better: order something and then throw a tantrum that it looks nothing like the picture.
The service workers don’t deserve that, the manager might tho since they probably OK’d that menu
Yep, the pro move would be to wait for the food to come out; politely ask your server if you could speak to the manager about the discrepancy between the photos and the actual food; ream the manager loudly once they arrive; and then leave without eating or paying. Super pro move would be to leave a small tip for the server as well.
THAT TOTALLY LOOKS LIKE HUMAN FOOD WHICH I SHALL CONSUME WITH MY…FOOD PORT.
MHMMM. SUSTINANCE. YUM YUM.
YES. SUSTINANCE FOR YOUR MOIST MOUTH PORT. DISREGARD WHILE I WATCH YOU INSERT THINGS INSIDE.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
… I feel genuinely uncomfortable now
WHY ARE YOU YELING FELLOW HUMAN?
ERROR: The sharp edges of the pokey mesh-lattice have damaged the inner lining of my food port.
Gotta spring for the ceramic-plated food port, best decision of my life.
FOOD PORT ME BABY 🤖
That shit doesn’t even look like food.
The trouble with food that looks like that, you have to keep an eye on it. Whenever you look elsewhere there’s a faint rustling noise, you catch a rapid movement in your peripheral vision and look back, only to see it has taken a different form. Chances are all the photos on the menu were actually the same dish. Is it alive? Is it sentient? Is it one organism or many? Such questions lose their meaning with food like this.
Oh and don’t eat it because you won’t be human any more
Eating this food will give you eyes on the inside.
the biscuits and gravy looks like dog biscuits… they are little bones, or somewhat resemble then anyways.
This is some sloppy slop.
Anyone that cares this little about how their food is represented before ordering, doesn’t care about the food or customer. It saved the owner $50 one time, and that was worth it.
Sorry, Riverstone Restaurant, but fuck off with this.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
How hard is it to take a picture of the food after it’s been prepared??? God damn…
Not that I’m on their side, but it can take a lot of prep and experience to take good food pics. Now having said that, often my favorite places have pictures that are decades old and faded, and probably weren’t great pictures to begin with.
yeah it takes prep and time, unless you just take pics of the food you’re vending and be honest.
there’s an idea. just advertise what you’re selling. wild huh?
anyway, both prepared pics and casual shots are better than literal fucking nightmare fuel.
That’s a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn’t look sexy enough. Or only when it’s hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.
I agree that’s the way it’s “always” done, but I disagree that it’s the only way it can be done, or that it’s even the best way to do it for a Mom&Pop joint. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asDjcgiwIiY
Commercial photographer here, shot for big brands and independents, with some super-fucking-expensive stylists. Never used anything like that, with the exception of coffee brands using whipped face cream instead of edible cream because it lasts much longer on set and they don’t give a fuck. Brands like McDonalds have learned from being sued, and document the whole process, weighing each ingredient so they can prove it’s real. The reason it looks fake as fuck is that they spend ~30 mins assembling one burger with tweezers and pins and hand-selected pieces of salad etc, syringes to pipe the sauce exactly where they want it etc.
Whats wrong honey? You’ve barely touched your needle skillet.
Hi there. Yeah, I’ll have the glistening yellow blorbs on whiteflats, fried 𝔾𝔼𝕆𝕄𝔼𝕋ℝ𝕐, waves o’ bacon aaaaand a slice of geographic meat. Do you do ōᴹᴹēᴸᴸēᵀᵀē with 🅀🅄🄱🄴🄼🄴🄰🅃? Cool, one of those too.
Sounds great. How do you like your grid twigs prepared?
Non-Euclidean for me, thanks.
Oh hell yeah, fried 𝔾𝔼𝕆𝕄𝔼𝕋ℝ𝕐, my favourite!
It’s really not hard to do normally. Almost everybody has a smart phone with a reasonably good camera on it. Take a clean table, turn on all the lights, make each dish with a little extra care so it looks nice, and take a picture of it. You don’t even have to pay anybody.
That means making each dish at least once before opening the restaurant to the public and spending money on ingredients without having a customer pay for them. You’d think a restaurant would make each dish at least once in a trial run for family and friends or something anyway before opening, but it seems not. Otherwise, another option is opening with a temporary text-only menu and taking pictures as customers order each dish. Not sure they’re going to get that chance at this point with spider-web hashbrowns in the menu. Who wouldn’t get up an leave after seeing that?
That requires effort though, I want the computer to do it for me! The future is grim.
Some look like plastic, some look like dogfood, and the second image is wigging out my trypophobia 🤮
Its extremely unpleasant. Why not use pictures of the food they actually have in the building? Even clip art or stock images would have been better.
“But making that food costs money! Getting ChatGPT to spit out a whole image costs me nothing, rather than the $1.30 it costs to whip up a plate of pancakes and an egg.”
I want pancakes! Will someone make me pancakes?
Takeing good looking photos of food takes effort and time. Layouting takes time and effort and knowledhe of how to use (possibly paid) layouting software.
AI likely hands you a result in 5-10 minutes, compared to hours of work for a menu made traditionally.
Bad looking photos with a bad layout would look better than this.
Also, I bet they had an old menu before this and they threw it away.
What do you have against short-order cook M.C. Escher’s waffles?
Off topic I guess, but I was surprised that nobody is talking about the asterix: Eating undercooked food might make you sick. Like, yeah, that’s your job to avoid? I’m assuming this is about runny egg yolks but still, is this considered normal in the US?
idk if that’s normal in the US but it looks like a normal AI generated thingy to me. Like I’ve seen AI trying to tell you to be safe, consult real humans etc. quite a lot. So I assume that that’s just part of it.
Then again we’re talking about the country where lettuce isn’t safe to eat so…Yeah, it’s very common on menus in the U.S. because we’re a bunch of litigious assholes and weird legal disclaimers disclaimers are sprinkled around our country like magic spells to ward off the lawyers representing narcissists.
I have no idea if that little warning has ever actually been tested in court in a food-borne illness case to see if it works, though. Businesses can’t always just waive customer safety liabilities away with finely-printed incantations.
Also, it doesn’t make sense to have the asterisk on stuff like the biscuits and gravy, only items where the customer picks the “doneness” like eggs or steak. WTF wouldn’t be fully cooked in biscuits and gravy? And if they’re going to do this stupid shit, it should also be on the “country ham breakfast” that comes with “two eggs any style,” since it’s on all the other egg items.
It is standard for menus to have that asterisk next to food items whose doneness you get to choose. Mostly steaks and burgers.
While I consider that statement normal, It is never something that is attached to every menu item.
First source I found from a search https://doh.vi.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Consumer-Advisory-for-Menus.pdf
Edit, another source with better examples https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/health/food/operators/consumer-advisory I am sure I could probably find something from the USDA or FDA ,but I already put too much effort into this.
Both your sources seem to suggest marking each applicable food item with the asterisk and having a disclaimer at the bottom, though.
I’m noticing now that the AI menu seems inconsistent in following these guidelines: No asterix for “Country Ham Breakfast” while “Pancake Combo” has one; both are served with eggs. Not to mention that I feel that the eggs themselves is what should be marked, unless undercooked pancakes and such is a thing?
I agree, very inconsistent markings. And it should be the eggs themselves.
Wait wtf?
Okay, I can see “runny yolk” as counting as undercooked, but a lot of those foods aren’t things that should be runny.
I hope no human actually typed this crap and it’s just something the AI decided to insert for reasons
“Runny yolks” was just my writing, though. You can see the asterix disclaimer at the bottom of the menu - it’s wording is reasonable. (I would have typed it out for you, but that’s way too much effort on mobile)
I know, what I mean is, there’s an asterisk on items like “biscuits and gravy”
Why the fuck are they undercooking biscuits and gravy? Do people want their biscuits done over-easy?
Oh yeah, I noticed that too. Doesn’t really make sense, no.
When cooking eggs sunny side up, I ALWAYS cook them with runny yolks. That’s how you retain the flavour. Been doing that forever, never a problem. Not in the USA.
Runny yolks are normal in the US too. This disclaimer exists on pretty much every menu in the US.
I think that’s pretty normal outside of Salmonella outbreaks - the problem in the US being that they wouldn’t necessarily know there’s an outbreak in time to stop people getting exposed. You might therefore want to be careful about making it sound like a zero risk choice rather than a low risk one.
If i remember correctly US has higher salmonella infection rates compared to the rest of the developed world
I can’t find any comparative data on this. Did you mean in people, in chickens or in chicken products (might be all three I suppose, since eggs are a major culprit)?
I’m sure I read somewhere that it’s partially due to the fact that in the US chickens are not immunised.
I found something on Wikipedia (under Prevention, Vaccine pertaining to this:
A 2014 study tested a vaccine on chickens which offered efficient protection against salmonellosis.[45]
Vaccination of chickens against Salmonella essentially wiped out the disease in the United Kingdom[citation needed]. A similar approach was considered in the United States, but the Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens.[46]
I’d assume it’s not a widespread practice globally from that wording?
I think you might be right. Strange though, I remember being a kid in the 90s/00s and nibbling on food that had raw egg and I don’t think I got sick. I guess my parents were just letting me rawdog it.
I’d assume the risk is low, or we wouldn’t have these serving practices. I assume most chickens (and eggs) aren’t contaminated with Salmonella - it’s only a problem if you happen to have an undercooked one that does. I guess it helps if you feel confident your government is on top of the issue and will warn you if there’s an outbreak.
It’s a legal disclaimer so they don’t get sued
I noticed that too… that asterisk makes me feel pretty grossed out, and seems like such an ai addition to a menu.
I’ve seen these AI food menus all over the place here in Vancouver. It sucks.
Tell the owner’s and then leave. They’ll only get the message if they start losing money over it.
What if i’m a bitch who doesn’t like confrontation?
Put it in a three star review
I’m in Kenya at the moment and it seems nearly all restaurant menus are made with AI. It’s awful and I keep asking if the food is real as the photos aren’t.
