Once upon a time a chef wrote a menu and believed it came from inspiration. Travel. Childhood memories. Possibly a grandmother who cooked with enough garlic to discourage vampires and most door to door missionaries. That was the theory anyway.
Unfortunately the menu now also comes from an algorithm.
The algorithm does not work in the kitchen. It has never burned its hand grabbing a sauté pan without a towel or yelled “corner” while turning into three servers and a bus tub moving in the opposite direction. It does not know the small panic of the printer suddenly spitting tickets like it has developed opinions about your life choices.
The algorithm lives somewhere else entirely. In delivery apps. In review platforms. In the glowing rectangles people stare at while someone across the table is telling a perfectly good story about their cousin getting arrested at a wedding.
And the algorithm has opinions.
Take delivery apps. Their algorithms adore foods that survive the trip across town. Things that can sit inside a cardboard container for half an hour and still arrive looking like they meant to do that.
Rice bowls thrive in this environment. Burritos flourish. Saucy things hold themselves together with admirable determination.
A delicate piece of fish, however, begins life as a tiny miracle of heat and timing. Crisp skin. Perfect interior. A chef’s quiet moment of pride.
Put that fish in a plastic container and send it on a thirty minute Uber ride and it arrives looking like it has reconsidered several important life decisions.
So people stop ordering it. Not because it wasn’t good. Because it didn’t survive the journey.
Eventually the chef notices. Bowls sell. Fish does not. One day the fish quietly disappears from the menu.
Tony from the grill station is thrilled about this development. Tony has always believed fish should only appear fried and inside tacos, preferably after midnight. He considers the disappearance of the delicate fish dish proof that the universe occasionally rewards common sense.
Then Instagram wanders into the kitchen.
Some dishes are born for the camera. They stack. They drip. They glow under restaurant lighting like they were engineered by a marketing department with access to molten cheese.
Other dishes taste extraordinary but photograph like beige paperwork. Roasted chicken is the classic victim. Delicious. Comforting. Photographs like a tired pillow someone left in gravy.
Meanwhile a burger stacked high enough to qualify as minor architecture becomes a celebrity. Someone films the cheese stretching in slow motion and suddenly the video spreads across the internet with the enthusiasm of gossip at a family reunion.
Now half the city wants the burger.
The chef begins making more burgers. Not because burgers were the dream, but because the internet decided burgers were the dream and the internet can be strangely persuasive when it is hungry.
Reviews add another force to the mix. A few guests mention the same dish. Then a few more. Soon diners arrive already expecting that plate, like pilgrims visiting a shrine made entirely of fried chicken and garlic aioli.
Before long the kitchen is producing that dish constantly. The line cooks can assemble it during a mild earthquake. One of them probably has assembled it during a mild earthquake, although that may have involved tequila and poor decision making after a shift.
This is how the algorithm becomes a silent collaborator. It rewards dishes that travel well, dishes that photograph well, and dishes people talk about online. Slowly the menu bends toward those signals.
Most restaurants never consciously decide to do this. It just happens. One dish sells better. Another fades away. A photo goes viral. A review repeats something enough times and suddenly that item becomes permanent.
Small nudges. But the nudges add up.
Now every restaurant is cooking for three different audiences at once. The guest sitting at the table. The guest ordering from a couch in sweatpants. And the algorithm deciding what the next thousand people see when they open an app.
Ignore the algorithm and your best dishes may remain invisible. Serve only the algorithm and the restaurant starts feeling like a content studio that accidentally sells food.
The interesting restaurants are learning how to balance the two. Cook food that tastes great, survives delivery, and looks dramatic enough to stop someone mid scroll.
Which is a strange new skill for chefs.
Season the dish. Plate the dish. Send it into the world.
And somewhere out there, floating through the digital ether like a food critic made entirely of math, the algorithm watches the menu evolve and quietly nudges things around.
It doesn’t wear a chef’s jacket.
But it is definitely editing the menu
