The most laborious part of setting up a restaurant system is entering the dishes: names in several languages, categories, allergens, pictures. The dish reference data service does this once for every restaurant: a restaurant searches the library, imports in one step and then adjusts to its own recipe.
What the library holds
| Record | Content | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Dish | Multilingual names and aliases, category, cuisine, course, temperature, spiciness, the fourteen allergens (three states), nutrition, picture, provenance | Becomes a dish on the restaurant’s own menu after import |
| Ingredient | Multilingual names, category, unit, allergens, and the traditional nature / flavour / phase labels | A shared vocabulary for recipes, stock and purchasing |
| Recipe | Which ingredients a dish uses, in what quantity, as main, auxiliary or seasoning | Derives allergen hints from ingredients; computes supply needs |
You can browse it now: the dish library and the ingredient library. Field definitions are in the data standards.
Import and contribution
- SearchSearch by a dish name or alias in any language; filter by category and cuisine.
- ImportThe chosen dishes are copied into the restaurant’s own menu with their names, classification and allergens, and become the restaurant’s own data.
- CheckImported allergens are hints; they are shown to guests as declared only after the restaurant confirms each against its own recipe.
- ContributeA restaurant can contribute its dishes back. Contributions enter a review queue and are accepted or rejected by the library’s operator; duplicates are detected.
Declaration over inference. Data in the library has two origins: declared by someone, or inferred from ingredients or open data. Where they conflict the declaration wins; inferred allergens and nutrition are hints and never a declaration on the restaurant’s behalf.
The recommended dish library
Beside the public library there is a recommended dish library. It takes in open dish and ingredient data (USDA, Open Food Facts, Wikidata, TheMealDB), breaks each dish into ingredients, method, cuisine and course, recombines them and derives allergen and nutrition hints for restaurants to browse, adopt and adapt. The redistributable core uses open sources only; commercial sources serve only as run-time enrichment when a restaurant brings its own key.
About allergens. Allergens in the dish library are reference labels. What a dish actually contains in a given restaurant depends on that restaurant’s recipe and the day’s preparation; the restaurant’s own declaration prevails. See the disclaimer.