Business

We Found The Most Hunger-Killing AI Food Pics Restaurants Are Flaunting

Wikimedia Commons/Public/Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0

Restaurants are serving up AI-generated food photos, and critics say they’re hard to stomach.

Eateries across the country are swapping real photographs of their dishes for images made with artificial intelligence. While AI image tools save small businesses time and money, some observers have mocked their results online for showing food that looks warped, unsettling and grotesque.

Daisy’s Diner and Bar in Brooklyn photographs its real dishes and then touches up the images with AI “to get the message out there,” the owner, Jordan Beau, said in a Sept. 24 Wall Street Journal video showcasing restaurants’ application of AI photography.

“All of our food is shot live by real people and we’re using AI to enhance it. That’s it,” Beau said. “And it allows our design team to be able to take an image that used to take them two or three hours to enhance now takes them two or three minutes.”

People say the AI-enhanced imagery results in “great menus,” according to Beau.

‘Yum, Slop’

But not every restaurant’s experiment with AI has gone over well.

San Francisco cafe Grind & Unwind was criticized online after owners AJ and Lyndsey Lozano hung a temporary menu featuring AI food images while the couple got the business off the ground in May, SFGATE reported.

“Yum, slop,” a Reddit user wrote on June 30 in a post sharing a photo of Grind & Unwind’s AI-generated menu. “I reckon utilizing AI imagery for the storefront menu board doesn’t correlate with a long tenured small business in this neighborhood.”

“That coleslaw looks terrible, and all the bread looks like reptile skin,” another Reddit user said, describing the menu.

The store was then vandalized, with “seriously” spray-painted in red on the awning above the storefront, according to SFGATE.

Likewise, Chi-Town Deli in Chicago created a temporary AI-generated menu of sandwiches while it waited for real menu photos to arrive, Business Insider reported. This menu, too, faced online criticism.

“AI has tragically struck my local deli. Reuben in particular looks like vomit,” Chris Murphy, writer for The Onion, said in an X post that included a photo of the deli menu.

‘Lovecraftian Food Horrors’

Others have posted more examples of AI food photos to X.

“The death of folk graphic design in favor of AI slop across our country’s delis is leading to some incredibly Lovecraftian food horrors,” one X user wrote, describing images of “hot entrees.” The post appeared to refer to H.P. Lovecraft, an early 20th century American author known for the “weird fiction” genre and his alien character Cthulhu.

“This is the one that’s been giving me ‘the mega horrors,'” another of the platform’s users stated, sharing a photo of an AI-generated breakfast burrito.

“[H]as anyone told restauranteurs that they don’t need to use the ‘crawling with maggots’ setting when they ai generate their food images?” an X user asked, commenting on an AI image of fried chicken.

Some restaurants are rejecting the technology.

“We will not be using AI flyers or photos to promote ourselves,” Wyoming’s Chugwater Soda Fountain said on a handwritten sign the company shared Aug. 22 on Instagram in a post that received over 240,000 likes.

DoorDash announced AI-powered camera tools in April 2025 that let restaurants adjust lighting and backgrounds of their menu photos. The tools leave the appearance of the food itself untouched, according to the announcement.

Similarly, Uber Eats released AI features in July 2025 that digitally clean up blurry menu photos and move food onto different backgrounds.

“There were five different pizza places that were using the same AI-generated image,” CEO and cofounder of Popmenu, Brendan Sweeney, told WIRED, when he searched for pizza on the platform. The food images are “obviously AI,” he said.