Taste Ocean City
How we read the menus
Read from the menus of 40 of the town’s 66 kitchens, every one that publishes a menu we could read · 1226 dishes · 15 kitchens read by eye, 25 by script · menus read 2026-09-10 How we read them
What this is
A map of what the town cooks, read from the menus the kitchens publish themselves. Not a review, not a ranking, not a price list. Each dish on these pages is a line a restaurant printed, reduced to facts a reader can walk between: what is in it, how it is cooked, how it arrives, and where it is served. The pages count. They do not judge.
The corpus today is 1226 dishes and 103 drinks at 40 of the town’s 66 food venues. That is every kitchen with a menu we could read, and it is not the whole town. Every page carries that line so a claim about 40 menus is never read as a claim about 66.
Two ways of reading, kept apart
15kitchens’ menus were pictures or PDFs and were read by a person, dish by dish. 25 were web pages and were read by a script that finds the dish names and tags what it can from the words on the line. The two are not the same kind of fact, and the pages do not pretend they are: a dish read by the script carries a hollow dot, and a page with any such dish says so once, near the top.
The script is measured against the people. Its tags for the 286 hand-read dishes are compared with what the person wrote, and the agreement is printed here from that comparison, not copied in.
| Field | Precision | Recall | Research floor | Public floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| preparation | 75.4 % | 25.3 % | 70 % · holds | 85 % · not yet |
| protein | 87.9 % | 81.8 % | 85 % · holds | 92 % · not yet |
| Field | Precision | Recall | Floor | Public floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| spirit | 95.6 % | 77.7 % | 85 % · holds | — |
| style | 98.4 % | 80.8 % | 85 % · holds | — |
| regional | 100.0 % | 92.3 % | 90 % · holds | — |
Recall is low on purpose and is not gated. A person reading a menu under the heading “From the Steamer” knows the shrimp are steamed whether or not the line says so; the script sees only the line. Precision is what matters on a page: a wrong “fried” under a kitchen’s name is a different kind of error from a missed one.
The script has not yet cleared the public floor, so the finder answers from hand-read dishes only and says so above its chips. Script-read dishes still appear on ingredient and dish pages, marked.
What the words were turned into
The dishes were reduced to 497 ingredients in a reviewed vocabulary with parents (cheddar is a cheese, a cheese is dairy), 759 dish ideas that recur across kitchens (a crab cake sandwich and a crab cake platter are one idea), and 621 pairings, counted only within a course so that fries beside everything do not drown the pairing a kitchen actually chose. Every link on these pages walks back to a line on a menu. There is no file of the graph; it is rebuilt from the corpus each time.
389 of the 1226dishes were read or confirmed by a person. The rest are the script’s, marked.
What the section refuses to do
- No prices. None were recorded, none can be added; a check on every write refuses a dollar sign.
- No menu text beyond the dish’s name. Descriptions were read for their facts and not kept.
- No ranking.“Eight kitchens fry their shrimp; three steam them” is a sentence these pages can say. “The best steamed shrimp” is not.
- No paid position in a result.A listing a kitchen pays for appears on the kitchen’s own page. Dish pages, the finder, and every count are computed from the graph and cannot be bought into.
When a plate is wrong
Every dish on these pages carries an “Is this right?” link. It opens a plain form: what the dish should say, and whether you work at the kitchen. No account. A person reads each one. A correction confirmed by the kitchen replaces the script’s reading and is marked as the kitchen’s. Menus change; the corpus is re-read on the town’s own calendar, and the date each menu was read is on every page.
Menus last read 2026-09-10. Start anywhere: an egg, a crab cake, or build a plate.