AI-Generated Restaurant Menus Are Ruining My Appetite

You know what I could really go for right now? Shrimp scampi in a lemnburre garrc salcre with oreganata breadbrumbs — just like my Grandma Ribando used to make. Or maybe it’s a Sausage Stuffed Mushroome kind of night? I squinted at the menu on a restaurant’s Instagram feed (I’ll leave out identifying details to spare their dignity), trying to decode this dish description: Fresh Mushroom Caps stuffed win fallan Sausage Topped with Irallan Creann-Sauce. In accompanying photos of the food, the shellfish boast a plasticine sheen and are the same width and slickness as the pepperoni rounds on the glassy-edged pizza. A pile of Brussels Sprouts Alla Alfresco (Oven roasted Brussel spouts tossed parmesan & Pancetta in a Now, bon glaze) are nearby. 

I think the edges of my previously sharp hunger have been smoothed off for the moment. Maybe forever. 

As artificial intelligence leaches into every crevice of our daily lives, I’m finding myself increasingly protective of simple, tangible pleasures — food being chief among them. If a restaurant doesn’t have faith in the appeal of its own menu — the belief that an undoctored picture and description of their baked spaghetti could light up the pleasure centers of my brain and send me sprinting toward their door — why should I? And yet, the menu slop is everywhere.

The AI infiltration

My sister-in-law had been raving about the lemnburre garrc salcre restaurant for a while. It’s a bistro helmed by a chef who is something of a local legend, and she’d followed him from restaurant to restaurant for years. Over the past quarter-century, his career trajectory took him from New Jersey to the South Carolina coast, as he amassed a loyal following for his classic Northern Italian cooking, accented by local Lowcountry ingredients. My husband and I were coming for a visit, and she’d been so excited to take me to his most recent place, where she’d enjoyed many meals with friends and family alike.

I love to whet my anticipation of any new restaurant by delving into its social media feeds and poring over its online menu, but on first glance at this place’s Instagram, my appetite was suddenly curbed. This was the place she was raving about? I saw the clear signs of AI-generated content: menus with unintelligible words and characters that do not appear on any keyboard; images of disturbingly smooth dishes that do not appear to be made of edible materials, and dining spaces seemingly lit by an alien sun. 

It took a moment for me to process, because I expected better from someone who had devoted decades of his life to the hands-on craft of traditional Italian food. It’s entirely plausible that the chef had no idea how his dishes were being presented for visual consumption online, and was thus unaware that his Nona’s sacred lasagna was styled to look like a saucy slab of mattress sprinkled in ash from Mount Etna, and that the spellings of his first name were subject to whimsy. (Not everyone is a voracious consumer of social media, and if he has an account separate from the restaurants, I didn’t find it.) 

The rest of the chef’s online presence is primarily earnest, unedited videos of the chef under the unsparing overhead fluorescent light of the restaurant’s non-Instagram-friendly kitchen, snapping on blue nitrile food service gloves, and talking younger staff (several of whom are his sons) through the steps of a perfect chicken Palermo, giardiniera, stuffed peppers, or lasagna — minus the memory foam and volcanic detritus. They’re unpolished, awkward, and clearly shot on someone’s older-model phone, but the chef moves through the motions and words with the unrehearsed grace of someone for whom dicing shallots is as natural as breathing. I am ravenous every time. The dishes posted to the restaurant’s account could not be his; he cares too much.

But wait, there’s more

Besides those incomprehensible dish descriptions and images of symmetrical, non-melting dessert lumps (Ice cream? Maybe? It trailed off after “Chef [Name Redacted for Privacy]s Homemade” before picking up with “Peach, Triple Chocolate, Saited Caramel”), I spied another oddity. It was a menu — in the same font, colors, and structure as dozens of others the restaurant had posted — propped on an outdoor patio resembling others I’d seen on the feed, but this one sloshed my stomach into the same mild nausea I feel when I mistakenly put on someone else’s prescription glasses and my brain lurches in the gulf between what I see and what I believe I know. 

“If I’m standing here, and there are planters of presumably the same size several feet behind this other set, why are they almost as large?” I wondered. “Where is the light coming from? Why are the cobblestones warped, uneven, and pitched in wildly different directions?”

The menu, seemingly four to six feet tall and tilted on an easel in front of a planter of coleus, petunias, and ornamental grass (all improbably vibrant for mid-autumn in hardiness Zone 8b) includes an appetizer of Crslay Fried Mussels Pot Ksascte Barno served with Mashed Paratoes, Vegersitie Medley and Real Whie Demi Glace, and a Tagllatelle Ala Panna Fresh l’agliutelle Pasta tossed in Strokle Gouda and Patmeoun Cream Sauce ur Ham and Frash in the “Enfrees” section. (Thank goodness this one clarified the previous mystery; the dessert is the chef’s Homemade ice Croams.) 

I went down a rabbit hole, comparing the patio photos they had posted versus customer photos shared on Yelp and Facebook, and then even went to Google Street view. By the time I emerged, I felt like my brain itself had gone through the looking glass because the space I had seen in the photo the restaurant had clearly generated existed in a different physical plane than the perfectly nice streetside dining area with modest planters that I saw in the candid snaps. (Seriously, I even asked ChatGPT if the image was AI and the response was basically, Oh hell yes, are you kidding me?)

A quick, cheap fix

On the site of one of the many digital restaurant design services I found, in addition to a preponderance of the word “frictionless,” a post offers a $19 monthly fee ($49 for the pro level) for restaurants to avail themselves of the company’s menu design resources, including offering coaching through prompts to generate AI images of dishes, and touts the “age-old culinary truth” that “We eat with our eyes first.” If that old adage is true, my eyes have suddenly come down with a stomach ache, and my heart has sunk. Don’t lie to me about food. It’s one of the most intimate promises we share as human beings.

Restaurant margins are tight, and professional photography is a luxury out of reach for many small businesses just trying to stay afloat, but this can’t be the way forward. 

I recently attended an AI seminar for hospitality pros at the Amex Resy Trade Program at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. Attendees made compelling cases for the use of artificial intelligence to integrate data from reservations databases, ordering systems, ordering trends, and even the weather. Not one of these industry veterans even suggested that the menu or the food or its presentation should be adulterated; the analysis and automations are for the purpose of allowing more time for the human touch. 

Quick Google searches for basically anything have been rendered increasingly opaque by AI, so it’s understandable that a restaurant strapped for time and cash and desperate to make a splash online could be hoodwinked into an unvetted service promising a quick, cheap fix for language and photos. They just have to know that it comes at the cost of diners’ trust — and public shame as potential customers, their peers, and publications call them out. 

Showing the human touch is more important than ever

I would rather see a photo of a sheet of notebook paper messily scrawled with the day’s specials in the chef’s own hand than feel the queasy upset as my eyes and brain try to meet across the uncanny valley of a dish I know cannot be real. Heck, have a kindergartener scribble a plate of spaghetti and meatloaf with crayons. Scan in a Polaroid. Let me know that human hands were involved. And I suspect others feel the same way. 

When we got to my sister-in-law’s house, she mentioned that the evening’s plans included a restaurant different from the one I’d been digitally stalking.

“Oh that place? We walked in last week and walked right out,” she told me. “They completely changed the menu when the chef left a couple months ago, and there’s nothing I want there. He’s working somewhere else now.”   

I found out where he’s cooking, and I hope we can go. His sons are with him in the kitchen — just as non-frilly, but much better lit. It’s ugly and imperfect, and the food itself looks marvelous, messy, fresh, and so very real. I close my eyes. My gross, gloriously human, guts growl with want.