Your Menu Doesn't Have to Be AI Slop

Somebody spray-painted the word "seriously" across a café's awning this summer. In red. Over a display of AI-generated food photos.

That's where we are now.

What actually happened

AJ and Lyndsey Lozano opened Grind & Unwind on Haight Street in San Francisco in May 2026. While they were still finishing their setup, they put up a board of AI-generated images of drinks and pastries in the storefront window. Lyndsey has said it was meant as a temporary sign, just so people walking by in a tourist-heavy area would know what they served.

It did not land that way. Someone photographed it, posted it to Reddit captioned "Yum, slop," and the comments went after the bread and the coleslaw specifically: reptile skin, unappetizing, one person asking that if this much effort went into the marketing, what does that say about the food.

On July 2, the Lozanos found the graffiti. Cleanup reportedly ran around $700.

Worth saying plainly: vandalizing someone's small business over a sign is not okay, and these were two people a few weeks into opening a restaurant, making a placeholder decision under time pressure. Plenty of us have made worse calls with less at stake.

But the signal underneath it is the useful part.

The part most coverage skipped

They fixed it, fast, and it worked.

By July 6 the AI board was gone, replaced with LED lighting and a case of the actual pastries Lyndsey bakes. Business reportedly picked up. They hired cooks. Community events went on the calendar.

The fix wasn't expensive photography or a rebrand. It was putting the real thing in the window.

Why this isn't really about the technology

It's tempting to read this as "customers hate AI." That's not quite it. Nobody vandalizes a café over AI-assisted inventory software.

Going by the actual comments, the objection is about honesty and effort. A photo on a menu is a promise about what you're getting. When it turns out to be generated, people read it as false advertising, even when the business meant no harm. One commenter put it directly: do you really think a ham, rosemary, and brie sandwich would show up looking like that?

This hits restaurants harder than almost any other category, because the product is visual. People order with their eyes. A gap between the photo and the plate loses trust before anyone has tasted anything.

What this means for your menu

If you can't get a real photo yet, don't fake one. A well-designed menu with zero photos reads as intentional. A menu with obviously synthetic ones reads as a shortcut, and customers increasingly clock the difference on sight.

Match the photo to the actual dish. Lighting, plating, portion size. It should look like something that could plausibly come out of your kitchen.

Treat printed and digital menus as one system. A sign, a menu, and an online ordering page each showing a different version of the same dish erodes trust just as fast as one bad AI image.

The businesses that come through this fine either invested in real photography or skipped photos entirely and let clean typography and clear descriptions carry the weight. Both beat a synthetic shortcut someone might screenshot for the wrong reasons.

A restaurant's actual story, the sourcing and the history and the people behind the pass, is the thing a template can't fake. We design menus for food and beverage clients that reflect the actual food, in a voice that sounds like the actual restaurant.

Need help working out what your menu needs, whether that's real photography, a redesign, or just cleaner copy? Let's chat.