Editor's Note
A photo of shrimp shaped like donuts went around the internet last week and pulled a lot of restaurants into it. Restaurant Business used it to argue that operators deserve some grace for using AI, and mostly they do. What's worth your time is what separates the operators who get that grace from the ones who don't, because it isn't the technology. Tech Spotlight has the other half: what operators actually type into AI when nobody is watching.
Let's get into it.
— James, Founder of Savory Bites
This Week In The Industry
Shrimp Scampi Donuts???
Look at the shrimp.
They're rings. Closed circles, glazed and scattered with chives, sitting on a bed of noodles like somebody emptied a box of Cheerios into a wok. No shrimp has ever looked like that. It went viral last week and became the internet's exhibit A for AI slop on restaurant menus.
Restaurant Business ran a column about it that opens by refusing to defend the practice, then makes the case for giving restaurants some grace anyway. That reasoning holds. Small operators are short on time and short on capital, and almost none of them have a marketing department. AI makes the work easier.
The two operators in the column are different examples.
One is a small vegetarian restaurant that also sells art and hosts live music. It started generating its weekly menu graphic with AI after the editing program it had used for years stopped being supported. One image. Menu and hours. Its own followers came after it for hypocrisy, and the owner, a poet, says the backlash had an impact on the business. He has since found a workaround. His frustration is with being singled out: "Picking out a few little businesses that use it because they can't afford to hire an artist to render their imagery is pointless."
The other is a diner generating most of its social feed with AI, videos too slick to be true. It has taken heat too, and it has also worked: almost every video pulls tens of thousands of views. The columnist's reservation is that the feed is hard to square with a classic diner running a farm-to-table menu.
That reservation is the part worth carrying home, and it has nothing to do with software. A video of a pancake is a promise about a pancake. If the video is better than the plate, you've spent money bringing in someone who will be disappointed by what you actually cook. That's worse than posting nothing.
Which brings it back to the shrimp. Nobody in the story can account for them, including the operator who is sympathetic to all of it and still said taking a photograph would have been easier. The columnist floats one explanation and says outright he would rather not entertain it: that the restaurants producing this simply don't care, and if so, they probably would not have lasted long anyway.
That's the dividing line, and it isn't AI or no AI. It's whether anybody looked at the thing before it went up.
Things worth doing this week.
For food, use a photo. Your phone in window light beats a generated version of a dish you actually cook. It costs you a plate and the time, so shoot four or five in one sitting and reuse them all season.
For menus, hours and event graphics, what that first restaurant lost wasn't an artist. It was a template. Canva and its equivalents are free at the level most restaurants need.
Tech Spotlight
What Operators Actually Ask AI
PAR Technology looked at the raw questions operators typed into its AI tool rather than counting clicks on preset categories. About a third are treating it as an analyst instead of a reporting tool, following up and drilling down instead of taking the first number and moving on.
The biggest cluster was loss prevention, and the questions were oddly specific. Cashiers with back-to-back zero-dollar transactions. Credit card refunds run on the same card in the last thirty days. These operators already knew what theft looked like. What they'd never had was a way to pull the evidence in seconds instead of days.
The gap PAR found is guests. Almost nobody asks about lapsed regulars, redemption patterns, or which dayparts are quietly losing people. The questions are all pointed inward.
Source: Modern Restaurant Management
Ellie's Corner
Every week this space is dedicated to something we're building at Ellie Carte. An AI phone ordering and restaurant management platform built for independent restaurants and hospitality operators.
Fair question after all of the above: an AI answering your phone is AI pointed at your customers too. The difference is that it isn't pretending to be anything. A generated photo works by looking like something it is not. A phone line works by saying what it is and then getting the order right. We build Ellie to be disclosed, not disguised. It picks up when the line is three deep and nobody can get to the phone, takes the order, and keeps the customer's history attached to their number.
👉 Learn more at elliecarte.com
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