How to Use AI to Decide What’s for Dinner​on February 6, 2025 at 1:33 pm

Almost any dish you can dream up is on the menu. Here’s how to choose dinner and even meal plan with AI.Almost any dish you can dream up is on the menu. Here’s how to choose dinner and even meal plan with AI. Almost any dish you can dream up is on the menu. Here’s how to choose dinner and even meal plan with AI.   

You can’t decide what to have for dinner tonight, but something yummy did just cross your social feed. Artificial intelligence might be able to help you choose by showing you how to make it.

SideChef is an app that advertises the use of “AI technology combined with our rich ingredient database” to create unique dishes, ingredient lists and recipes using only a photo. (Read CNET’s review of a SideChef recipe in real life here.)

Part of what makes deciding what’s for dinner so hard for some people may be that we all have so many options. Something as simple as spaghetti and meatballs can become an exercise in overcoming decision paralysis when you have the whole of the internet to food lurk on. 

SideChef outshines the other AI meal planning tools because of its use of image recognition. When it comes to deciding what’s for dinner when you want something outside of your day-to-day usual, the RecipeGenAI feature, which launched in beta in August 2024, may be the most useful. 

In addition to being offered recipes suggested by something boring and practical like what you already have on hand, SideChef allows you to find what looks good to you in the annoying moment you’re trying to decide what’s for dinner.

Overcome your decision paralysis by scrolling your social feeds and discovering a dish on the menu of a place you already love to eat, or get inspired and try your hand at something you’ve never made before but saw on a Netflix show you watched the other night. Put those food pics you took over the years to good use, or screenshot a picture from the online menu of your favorite restaurant.

Here’s what I did for my test:

1. I downloaded the SideChef mobile app and created an account (it has a seven-day free trial and costs $5 a month thereafter).
2. I took a low-res screenshot of an IG post about a lobster dish from famed chef Thomas Keller’s California restaurant, The French Laundry, and uploaded it to SideChef. 
3. SideChef was able to match the majority of the ingredients in a way that created something that wasn’t an exact copy, but a dish that might be in the spirit of the original.

The avoidance of creating the exact recipe doesn’t seem too big a sin, as the prospect of anyone being able to take a photo of something someone made or owns and get the exact specifications on it — like every single ingredient in a specific recipe from a master chef and the specific steps to make it — could result in adverse side effects on the original creator.

Repeat the above process with whatever meals look good to you and you’ll be able to get a very quick gauge on whether you have the ingredients, as well as whether you’re up to the difficulty level required for cooking each dish. That way, you can decide what’s for dinner tonight and even what you can cook for the week ahead. 

The app even offers price estimates and ordering on some groceries through a partnership with Walmart, and the onboarding takes you through a process where you can input details about your needs and preferences, like dietary restrictions. If you’re meal prepping and bulk cooking, you could let SideChef know you need the recipe to feed 10 people so it lasts you the whole week.

Full disclosure: No one in my home has tried making these particular recipes, so maybe those flavors don’t make sense together or the recipes are bad, but any recipe you get online and haven’t tried before is bound to be a little risky. 

A caveat with all AI tools is make sure you give it a thorough read through. And for this one, do it before you start cooking to make sure it makes sense and it hasn’t hallucinated something bizarre like putting glue in pizza.