What to Eat Today

The food picker is a small tool for people who cannot decide what to eat. It has a built-in menu of 90 common dishes and food-shop options, split into seven categories: Chinese, Western, Fast Food, Japanese & Korean, Vegetarian, Hot Pot & BBQ, and Desserts & Drinks. You choose which categories to consider, optionally add your own favorites, and press one button to let the tool choose at random. It only does random picking. It does not recommend based on your health, budget or city, and it does not search for restaurants online. Everything runs in your browser.

How to use it

1. Under 'Choose cuisine categories (multi-select)', toggle the categories you want to draw from. All seven are selected when the page opens, and selected ones have a dark fill. Click again to deselect.
2. If you have regular favorites, type them into 'Add your own (optional, one per line)', one per line, for example the noodle shop downstairs or your mother's braised pork. They are merged into the same pool as the selected categories, with equal weight.
3. Click 'Eat this today!'. The button changes to 'Choosing…' and the displayed name flickers for roughly a second. Where it stops is your result, shown in the 'Today's pick' card.
4. If you are not happy, click again to draw again. A line at the bottom lists 'Recently picked' items.

What is on the built-in menu

Chinese has 30 items, including malatang, braised chicken rice, Lanzhou noodles, Shaxian snacks, clay pot rice, dumplings, snail rice noodles, soup dumplings, pickled cabbage fish, kung pao chicken, mapo tofu and twice-cooked pork. Western has 12, such as burgers, pizza, pasta, steak and salad. Fast Food has 10, including fried chicken, McDonald's, KFC, convenience-store bento and self-heating rice. Japanese & Korean has 14, such as sushi, ramen, Korean fried chicken, bibimbap, oden and tempura. Vegetarian has 8, such as a vegetarian buffet, cold tofu salad and vegetable salad. Hot Pot & BBQ has 8, including Sichuan hot pot, skewer hot pot, lamb skewers and crayfish. Desserts & Drinks has 8, such as milk tea, ice cream, cake, a fruit salad bowl and tofu pudding. The menu is fixed in the page; you cannot edit or delete single items, only exclude whole categories.

A scenario for making a decision

Say three colleagues cannot agree on lunch. Deselect the categories nobody wants today, such as Desserts & Drinks and Vegetarian, add the places everyone is happy to go to in the custom box, and press the button once. The result is random and changes every time, so no specific outcome is quoted here. A useful habit is to agree beforehand that whatever it picks is what you eat, so the group does not reopen the debate. If you want to choose among only a few fixed options, deselect every category and type just those options in the custom box, which turns the tool into a plain random chooser.

Limits and known quirks

• The built-in menu has only 90 items and leans toward common mainland Chinese dining. It has no very regional specialties and no grouping by time of day such as breakfast or late-night food.
• If every category is deselected and the custom box is empty, the pool is empty and clicking the button shows 'Please select at least one category or add your own dishes'. Keep at least one category or write at least one custom entry.
• The picker automatically avoids the last two results to reduce repeats, but if that leaves nothing to choose from, it falls back to the full pool. The page remembers at most the last 5 picks, and the record clears on reload.
• Custom entries are merged with built-in ones and de-duplicated, so typing a name that matches a built-in item does not raise its chance of being picked.
• In the English interface, built-in items show English names, but your own custom entries are not translated and appear as typed.
• Every option has the same probability. Price, calories and healthiness are not considered, and allergies or dietary restrictions are not taken into account. 'Vegetarian' is only a label for the category and is not a certification of strict vegetarian food; check yourself if you need strictly vegetarian meals or have allergies.
• It does not read your location or tell you where to find a restaurant. There are no reviews, delivery or navigation features.

Is it really random?

Each pick uses the browser's cryptographic random number source and chooses with equal probability from the pool. The fast-changing display is only an animation, and the item it finally stops on is the one that random number selected. The only non-random rule is that the last two picks are avoided.

Why did I not get the same dish as before?

The tool temporarily leaves the two most recent picks out of the pool so you do not get the same thing several times in a row. If you want them all to be possible again, reload the page to clear the record.

Can I draw only from my own list?

Yes. Deselect all seven categories and type one option per line in the custom box, and the draw will use just your list. Remember that custom entries are not saved and vanish on reload, so keep your list in a notes app and paste it in when needed.

Will it tell me which nearby restaurant is good?

No. It gives only a dish or food type, with no maps or review data. After it picks malatang, you still need a map or delivery app to find a place that serves it.

Privacy and processing

Your category choices, custom entries and picks stay in the page's memory only. They are not uploaded to a server and not written to the browser's local storage. Reloading or closing the page clears everything.