Drop a menu photo on the mat
JPEG, PNG or WebP — read in seconds, never stored.
鱼香肉丝 is not “fish-fragrant pork silk.”
Chinese dish names are poetry, history and in-jokes. Translate them word by word and you get nonsense — there is no fish in yuxiang pork, no ants in ants-climbing-a-tree, and 夫妻肺片 is emphatically not what the characters say. We name dishes the way an English-language food writer would, then tell you what actually arrives at the table.
66 dishes on our food pages were eaten, photographed and priced by us. When one shows up on your menu, the scanner marks it ✓ and adds our ordering tip — like asking for 麻婆豆腐 “wēi là” if you can’t take Sichuan heat.
Glare and handwritten chalkboards can defeat it, and AI can misread — treat prices as a guide and confirm with staff. It only transcribes what is visible. It never invents dishes, and if your photo isn’t a menu it will say so instead of guessing.
Field notes for a clean read
from our own restaurant tables01 — Shoot straight-on, one page at a time. A tilted photo loses the price column first.
02 — Laminated menus bounce ceiling light. Angle slightly, or shade the page with your hand.
03 — Picture menus still need us: we read the printed names, which is where the surprises hide.
04 — On a long menu, find the 招牌菜 (signature dishes) page. That’s what the kitchen is proud of.
Privacy: your photo travels over HTTPS, is read in memory and discarded — never written to disk, never used for training. We keep no copy.