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Paste a dish description, get six diagnostics — sensory adjectives, provenance signals, technique words, length, hedge words, pricing — each annotated with the research behind it. The Inspector teaches you what to look for. It does not rewrite for you.
Search words customers used
From Search Ideas. Tap a chip to drop it into the dish name as a starting point.
Paste a CSV or TSV with one row per dish. The first row should be a header — typical names (Item, Description, Price, Tier) auto-map. Tabs and commas both work; quoted-CSV is supported. Tip: if you only have name + description in one paste, the parser will figure it out.
Each move is a direction, not a rewrite. The Inspector teaches you what to look for, not which words to use.
Three questions. Answer in plain words — we synthesize a starter description you can react to (cut, tweak, replace).
Starter (yours to edit)
Save this analysis to the Workshop so it follows you across devices.
Sign in to saveThe Copy Card PNG is a 1200×1500 image with each description’s original copy on the left, the diagnostic gloss on the right, and a teaching legend at the bottom — designed for a chef or copywriter to read without ever opening this URL. Up to 4 items per card; longer menus produce a numbered series. The CSV mirrors per-item scores; the JSON includes full per-item math + thresholds; the ZIP bundles everything plus a README. Composed entirely in your browser — no upload.
Read these once and you'll start seeing them in your own menu. Read them ten times and you won't need this tool. Each card lists the actual lexicon the rules engine uses; everything is open-source in /tools/menu-copy/menu-copy.js.
Same dish, same length, same vocabulary the cook uses every day. The difference: one or two more sensory words, the producer named, and the hedge cut. None of these are "writerly" — they're things the line cook can describe out loud.
Before
Our nice fresh delicious house salad — just simply our best.
After
Crunchy little gems with shaved breakfast radish, lemon, and a buttermilk dressing we make every morning.
Cut: nice / fresh / delicious / just / simply / our best (six hedges). Added: crunchy (sensory), little gems (variety), breakfast radish (specific produce), every morning (technique).
Before
Half a chicken with potatoes and seasonal vegetables.
After
Half a Path Valley chicken, brined overnight and roasted on the bone, with crisped fingerlings and pan jus.
Added: Path Valley (provenance — name the farm), brined overnight / roasted on the bone (technique), crisped / pan jus (sensory + technique). Same proteins, same vegetables, same plate cost.
Before
Hand-rolled tonnarelli with pecorino and pepper.
After
Hand-rolled tonnarelli with smoky pecorino and cracked black pepper.
Two-word change. Smoky and cracked are both sensory; together they take a 7-word description from "fine" to "I want that." Read it out loud — the rhythm is the point.
These are pattern illustrations, not your menu. The Inspector never writes for you — it points at directions. The rewrite is yours, or your line cook's, or whoever knows what makes the dish sing.
It is not a rewriter, a voice / tone analysis, or a substitute for menu engineering. More on the limits below.
The whole rules engine — the sensory lexicon, the technique list, the hedge blocklist — is bundled in /tools/menu-copy/menu-copy.js, a single dependency-free script you can read directly. No upload, no account, no localStorage writes. Open DevTools → Network and type into the box: the request list does not grow.
A nine-step verifiable privacy tour and a printable Copy Card land in a follow-up release. For the same posture today, see how Brand Suite protects your logo — this tool is built on the same architecture.
The Inspector is sharp, but it is one specific tool — designed to teach, not to write. Knowing what it isn't is what makes it durably useful.
By design. By 2027 every chatbot will rewrite menu copy adequately; what no chatbot does well is teach a small-business owner to read their own copy critically. The Inspector tells you what's missing — it does not tell you which words to use to fix it. Ten quarterly runs over two years and you'll write better menus from scratch.
A whole-menu voice profile ("you sound like a 2015 farm-to-table restaurant") is a separate, paid offering. The Inspector reads items, not systems. If your menu reads as “voice missing” across the board — low signal density throughout, generic words everywhere — that's a brand-voice problem, not a copy-polish problem.
Polished copy on a Dog is still a Dog. Run the Menu Engineering Matrix first to learn which items are worth the rewriting time. The Inspector is the how; the Matrix is the which.
The lexicons are curated, not exhaustive. A sensory adjective the Inspector doesn't recognise (or a regional ingredient that should signal provenance) won't fire. The diagnostics are conservative on purpose — false negatives are easier to fix than false positives. v1 lexicon recognises English; full Spanish lexicon support is on the way.
What this is: a permanent skill upgrade you can run quarterly.
Three audiences, three handoffs. The Copy Card is the visual a non-technical reader can use — bring it to the chef before the next menu reprint. The CSV is for the accountant or operator running quarterly comparisons. The JSON is for a developer building anything on top of your menu data. The Inspector itself is the slow-cooked benefit: ten owners who run it once a quarter for two years write better menus from scratch than they did before.
When you want a brand-voice rewrite, hire the studio.
If the Inspector flags “Rewrite” across most of your menu, you don't have a copy problem — you have a voice problem. Brand-voice work is the studio's actual paid offering. Bring your Copy Card to the kickoff call.
See brand & menu voiceEvery check this tool runs maps to a specific concept in the Library. Two starting points — one definition, one playbook.
the language doing the selling, separate from the dish
The words next to each item — the descriptive sentence, the dish name, the price as it appears on the page — viewed as a separate craft from…
Read the definition Glossarya word that names a flavor, texture, temperature, or preparation
A modifier in a menu description that names a perceptual quality of the dish — flavor (smoky, briny, tangy), texture (crispy, silky, chewy),…
Read the definition Glossaryprices ending in .95, .99, or .49
A pricing convention in which the cents portion ends in a number designed to make the price feel lower than the next round figure — \$19.95 …
Read the definition Glossarynot a PDF, not an image
A menu built as real text on a web page, instead of as a PDF file or a photograph of a printed card. Real text means phones can render it at…
Read the definition ArticleThe honest playbook for raising menu prices on an independent restaurant's website — which items to raise, how to stage it, and the website moves that protect reservations.
Read the playbook