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.
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.
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.
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
yeah, I’ve been shooting my own images for the mealie i setup and even perfectly arranging the plate and putting all the kitchen lights on it, it just looks kinda meh. Except for sandwhiches. bread always looks fine AF.