What to Order

What to Order is a free web app that helps you find food you'll love on any restaurant menu. Rather than reading through page after page of dishes, you tell it what you're in the mood for and it checks every dish on the menu for you, so the ones that fit rise to the top. It ships with menus for a group of US restaurant chains, including The Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden, IHOP and Chipotle, and it also works with any menu you photograph yourself. It is built for anyone who has sat down at a table, been handed a menu, and not known where to start. The problem it addresses is menu overload. As the maker describes it, you sit down at The Cheesecake Factory, are handed a menu with 331 items, flip through it, get nowhere, and end up ordering the same thing as last time. A long menu does not make choosing easier; it makes choosing harder, because it asks you to scan for something you have not defined yet. What to Order works the other way around: instead of starting from the menu and hunting for a dish, you start from your mood, your diet or your occasion, and the menu is checked against that. The core of the product is natural-language, mood-based search over a menu. You type what you feel like — "something spicy", "chocolate, obviously" — and the app checks every dish on the menu for the ones that match, so the dishes that fit float up from the menu. Because the input is free text rather than a fixed set of filters, you can describe a craving in your own words instead of translating it into a cuisine, a price range or a menu category first. "Spicy" works as a request on its own, and so does a more specific combination. That free-text input also handles constraints and real-life situations, not just cravings. The examples the product gives include "I need to lose weight", "I'm vegetarian", "hangover cure", "my picky 6 year old", "high protein after the gym" and "light lunch before a meeting". These are not menu categories — they are the reasons people actually struggle to choose — and the app treats them as search criteria across the whole menu. Requests can be combined too: "spicy vegetarian" is given as a working example, so a craving and a dietary rule can be expressed in the same sentence. That means one person at the table can search for something spicy while another searches for something a six-year-old will accept, without either of them reading the full menu. Requests are not limited to a single dish. Asking for "Thanksgiving dinner for 2" returns a whole order rather than one plate, and the example given includes pumpkin cheesecake as part of it. In other words, the app can work at the level of a meal or an occasion — a combination of dishes for a specific number of people — rather than only at the level of an individual item. That makes it useful for planning what a table will actually eat, not just for answering the question of what one person should pick. The app currently covers a set of US restaurant chains — seven of them so far — including The Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden, IHOP and Chipotle, with more named on the site. The Cheesecake Factory menu visible in the product shows how broad those menus are: appetizers, flatbread pizzas, burgers, sandwiches, salads, pastas, seafood, steaks, sides, the SkinnyLicious lighter options, a kids' menu, brunch dishes, cheesecakes and other desserts, plus coffees, cocktails, wine and zero-proof drinks. That spread is exactly the situation the app is designed for — hundreds of items across dozens of sections, where a plain menu view is hard to search by hand. If you are eating somewhere that is not one of the supported chains, the app still works: you snap a photo of the menu and it works from that menu instead. That extends the product from a fixed set of restaurant menus to any menu you can photograph, whether it is a chain you have not seen before, an independent restaurant or a printed specials sheet at the table. It is the same interaction either way — describe what you want, get back the dishes that fit — but the source of the menu changes from a built-in menu to a photo you take. The product's distinctive approach is the direction of the search. Instead of browsing a menu and hoping something catches your eye, you state an intent and the menu is checked against it, dish by dish. The description on the site sums this up as dishes that "float up from the menu" when you say what you are in the mood for. Nothing is hidden from you and nothing is added: the app works over the restaurant's own menu and surfaces the items that match what you asked for, which keeps the result grounded in what the restaurant actually serves. The benefit is that you skip the flip-through. You no longer have to read 331 items to find the two that fit what you want tonight, and you are less likely to default to the same order as last time simply because it is the only one you remember. Requests in plain language remove the translation step between what you feel like and what the menu calls it, and the ability to ask for a combination — spicy and vegetarian, or a whole dinner for two — means the app can answer the question the table is actually asking rather than a simplified version of it. Typical use cases come straight from the requests the product shows. Someone trying to lose weight uses it to find the lighter options on a big menu. Someone with a craving types "something spicy" and gets the spicy dishes instead of scanning for them. A vegetarian types "I'm vegetarian" and sees only what fits. A parent searches for the picky six-year-old in the group. Someone leaving the gym looks for a high protein dish, someone with a meeting afterwards looks for a light lunch, and someone who just wants dessert types "chocolate". Tables with mixed needs search more than once, and anyone ordering for two can ask for a whole meal rather than a single plate. What to Order is aimed at diners rather than restaurants: people sitting in a chain restaurant or anywhere else with a menu in front of them, including groups with different dietary needs and parents ordering for children. It runs on the web, it is made by Nicolas Grenié, and it is free to use. The supported chain menus cover The Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden, IHOP and Chipotle among the seven US chains available, and the photo feature covers everything else. Overall, What to Order is a free, web-based way to search a restaurant menu by mood, diet or occasion instead of reading it top to bottom. Describe what you want — spicy, vegetarian, high protein, a picky kid's dinner or a whole Thanksgiving meal for two — and the dishes that fit float up from the menu, whether that menu is one of the supported US chains or a photo you take at the table.