Everything Menu Decoder does, in the order you'll use it
No screenshots needed — the app explains itself as you go. This page just walks through what each part is for, so nothing feels unfamiliar the first time you sit down at a table.
Set up Settings — once
Everything Menu Decoder flags comes from your profile, built in the Settings screen. It's saved on your device, not on any account, and you can change it anytime.
- Allergies — check any that apply, then set a severity: Very careful (anaphylaxis risk) or Moderate (intolerance). Anaphylaxis-level severities make the app more cautious across the board — a cuisine that commonly hides your allergen gets at least a CAUTION, even without a direct ingredient match.
- Health conditions — celiac disease, diabetes, low-sodium needs, and similar.
- Medications — drug-food interactions are safety flags too. They come back as AVOID or CAUTION exactly like an allergy, with the reason shown.
- Religious — kosher, halal, and similar rules, so dishes like carbonara or a gelatin dessert get flagged for the ingredient you'd otherwise have to ask about.
- Lifestyle — vegan, vegetarian, and other standing choices.
- Diet programs — optional. Pick the eating plans you follow (keto, Mediterranean, DASH, paleo, and more). This scores dishes for fit, on a completely separate scale from your safety flags above — it can never soften or override one.
- My avoid list — type anything that's personally yours and isn't a standard allergen: cilantro, MSG, a specific brand, whatever it is.
Every section shows a live count when collapsed, so you can see your whole profile at a glance.
The Today bar — per-scan choices
On the Check-a-menu screen, the Today bar sits above the capture area for choices that change meal to meal, not profile to profile:
- Scanning for — "Me" (your saved profile) or "Guest" (no profile, useful for someone at the table without one set up).
- Diet program today — pick a subset of your saved diet programs for just this scan, without changing your Settings.
Allergies, conditions, medications, religious rules, and lifestyle always apply and never appear here on purpose — those are safety settings, not something to toggle quickly before a meal. Change them in Settings.
Three ways to hand over a menu
- Photo — snap a picture of the physical menu, or drag one in from your camera roll. Works with printed menus, chalkboards, and handwritten specials.
- Paste text — copy the menu text from anywhere and paste it directly. Fastest option when a restaurant's site already has the menu as text.
- Menu link — drop in a URL. Works with a restaurant's website and with QR-code menus — scan the table's QR code with your phone's camera first, then paste that link in.
Pick whichever is fastest at the table. All three run through the same profile and the same verdict engine.
Reading the results
Every dish on the menu gets exactly one of four verdicts:
Verified vs. unverified — each flag also carries a tag. Verified means the verdict came from our hand-curated, human-reviewed ingredient database. Unverified means it came from an AI inference on the menu text, only shown above a strict confidence threshold, and only ever used to add a caution — never to remove or soften a verified flag.
Why UNKNOWN is honest, not a failure — a menu description can't show what's in the fryer oil or what the kitchen quietly swaps in. When we don't have enough to say something responsibly, saying nothing would look like an all-clear it isn't. So instead we say UNKNOWN, out loud, every time — overflagging is annoying, but a missed allergen is dangerous, and that trade is made on purpose, in your favor.
Top picks and the ask-staff list
If you've picked any diet programs, a Top picks strip appears above the dish list — the best-fitting dishes for your plan, pulled only from dishes with nothing flagged. Diet fit is scored on its own scale (great / good / neutral / poor / off-plan) and never shares a color, icon, or word with a safety verdict, and it can never override one.
Every CAUTION and UNKNOWN dish also carries short, specific questions worth asking your server — tap one once you've asked it, and it gets a line through it, so you can track the table's conversation as it happens.
Typical recipes
Open a dish card and ask for its typical recipe — a plain-language ingredient list and steps for how that dish is usually made, drawn from the same knowledge base behind the verdicts where we have it, or a fast AI summary when we don't. It's there to help you understand why a dish was flagged, and what a kitchen would need to leave out to make it work for you.
Saving cards and recipes
From the results screen you can save a summary card for the whole menu, or save an individual recipe you looked up. Everything you save lands in the Saved tab, with filters for All, Cards, and Recipes, so you can find a past scan again — this restaurant's satay was fine, that one's wasn't. Saved items stay on your device.
Chef cards, in the kitchen's language
A chef card turns your saved allergies and avoid list into a card you can hand straight to your server or the kitchen — built from the same profile as your safety flags, nothing new to fill in. Open it from Settings or from the results screen ("Chef card for this table").
Pick where you're dining first — a country picker suggests the right language automatically (say, Thailand suggests Thai) — or choose a language directly yourself. The card is built for legibility across the table: large type, a clear "cannot eat" heading, and a plain avoid list, with an option for more languages if the suggested one isn't the right fit. Save it, download it, or print it at the table.
Changing the app's language
Menu Decoder's interface itself — not just the chef card — is available in 19 languages. Change it from the language picker at the top of Settings; it takes effect immediately, everywhere in the app, and your profile stays exactly as you set it up.
The close button
The ✕ in the top-right corner closes the app to a simple goodbye screen — useful once you're done at the table and want a clean handoff of your phone, or just a quiet exit. Nothing is lost: tap "Open again" (or just come back to the tab) and you're right back where you left off, profile and all.