What things cost on the menu in Milan

The line marks the middle price, the grey bar the middle half of the menus; each item has its own scale. Beer and wine count per half litre and per eighth of a litre, from the menus that print the size, because a glass differs from one country to the next.

4,788 of 15,347 menu pages had no prices to read

Most of them load the menu by script or show it as a picture, so the page's text holds no prices. An AI assistant asked what a place costs meets the same page and has nothing to quote. Restaurants and cafes can check what an assistant reads on their own site.

Can an assistant read your menu?

From the menu page to the middle price

The scanner notes where each business keeps its menu online. It can be a page of its own or a PDF, and sometimes the home page carries it. The restaurant and cafe indexes of Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, Brussels, Cologne, Hamburg, Lisbon, Lyon, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris and Vienna had 15,347 menu addresses, counting a menu shared by a chain once and leaving out marketplaces and social media pages. Each was fetched once. 10,559 had prices in their text. Most of the others load their menu by script, which leaves no text to read.

A small AI model read the lines around the prices on each menu and named the items it found, with the price as printed and the size when the menu gives one: Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 for Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cologne, Hamburg, Lyon, Madrid, Milan and Munich; Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 for Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon and Vienna; Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 for Paris. The menus of Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cologne, Hamburg, Lyon, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, Vienna and Paris were also asked for the cheapest lunch offer, with what it includes, for a cola and a bottle of still water with their sizes, and for a cover charge. A price counts only when that number appears on the page next to the item's name. 7,601 pages turned out to be menus with prices.

A second check read answers drawn at random against the page each came from. It was done by Claude Opus, a larger AI model than either reader. In Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cologne, Hamburg, Lyon, Madrid, Milan and Munich, 47 of 50 were right, the choice of item included. The misses were a dish of the week served all day taken for a lunch offer, the price of a soup added to any main course taken for a lunch menu, and a sangria taken for a glass of wine. In Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon and Vienna, all 48 that could be tied to their item were right, the choice of item included; 2 more couldn't be tied to their item, on PDF menus that print the prices in a column apart from the items. In Paris, 47 of 50 were right, the choice of item included. The misses were the first wine on the list instead of the cheapest by the glass, a fish burger taken for a beef one, and a fixed-price offer the menu doesn't tie to lunch.

Nothing here is scored. The prices don't change any business's grade.

Data: ODbL. Business data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors and Overture Maps. Prices come from each business's own menu page, read by the Direct Index.