Tired of eating out? I tried out this AI recipe generator to create restaurant food at home

I am a serious foodie but a funny cook. Luckily, I live in New York, where it’s cool not to cook and there are endless options for eating out. I am spoiled for culinary choice, with some of the best restaurants in the world within walking distance of my home.

I tried to recreate my favorite food but failed even with the simplest dishes. So when I heard there was artificial intelligence app that would turn any photo into a recipe, I had to try it.

SideChef’s RecipeGen AI app is a home cooking and online shopping platform. A new beta AI feature allows chefs (or would-be chefs) to snap a photo any kind dish in a restaurant or on social media and promises instant step-by-step recipe generation.

I wanted to see how accurate the ingredients were and how close it could come to a restaurant meal I had eaten recently.

SideChef is the award-winning shoppable recipe platform that has been around since 2013. and its RecipeGen AI feature launched this month as a step-by-step home cooking app. It’s free to download and use.

There it is!

From Sous Chef to SideChef

Setup was simple. I downloaded SideChef app on my phone and clicked Addthen Generate a recipe from a photo. You can take a photo directly in the app or choose an image from your library.

To test SideChef’s accuracy, I wanted to try two methods:

1. Upload a photo of a dinner I had at a restaurant.
2. Upload a picture of a dinner I ate at home (because I know exactly what I’m putting in it).

For the restaurant food, I chose a beginner-friendly brunch dish to make SideChef easier to decipher. We had lunch at Malibu Farm on a recent trip to California, where they put a new spin on breakfast staples like sweet butter and soft sourdough.

I checked the menu to see what the ingredients were so I could cross-check better: “scramble – sourdough focaccia and breakfast potatoes with a choice of strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, eggs and bacon.”

Here’s what SideChef came up with:

I was immediately disappointed by the lack of attention to detail. The dish was missing red peppers, green peppers, onion seasoning and potatoes. I don’t think there was milk either, but SideChef included it. It also left out the flagship flavor profiles of strawberry butter, ricotta cheese and sourdough focaccia.

To give SideChef the benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to tell the sourdough focaccia apart because the photo doesn’t show the dimpled top of the bread — but it doesn’t even list the sourdough.

It may also have been difficult for SideChef to spot the ricotta in the eggs (mistaking the creaminess for milk). I didn’t even try the strawberry butter, which prompted me to buy regular butter instead.

No, I want my boogie strawberry butter. At this point I felt that SideChef was more interested in using AI to get an affiliate commission through Walmart (the fulfillment partner).

Before moving on to my homemade recipe, I tried another photo of a restaurant dish to test its culinary capabilities.

Ramen this time!

I uploaded this photo:

It “thought” for about 15 seconds, then I got an error. Tried again as advised but no luck.

Okay SideChef, let’s try this a different way. I chose my favorite dish that my wife makes: sweet potato gnocchi with sausage!

I know the exact ingredients because she made a video about it:

• Sweet potato
• An egg
• flour
• sausage
• mushrooms
• oil
• Broth
• Parmesan

There it is!

Now we are cooking.

This time it worked out much better. It had the basic ingredients but added sundried tomatoes, probably because we had basil.

With the ingredients at 90%, I checked how the app suggested I cook it and how it differed from how we actually did it.

SideChef suggested:

SideChef actually made the recipe more complicated than it needed to be. These are seven simple steps:

• Heat the sweet potato, cut it in half, remove the skin and mash it in a bowl.
• Add one egg and beat.
• Add a cup of flour and mix.
• Cut the sweet potato dough into four pieces, roll each into a thin rope, then cut into small pieces of gnocchi.
• Cook the sausage in a pan. Add the mushrooms, butter and stock.
• Boil the gnocchi, then add them to the pan to crisp them up a bit.
• Sprinkle with parmesan.

SideChef’s recipe does not specify removing the jacket from the sweet potatoes or clearly indicate how to prepare it. It advised us to bake the gnocchi, but we boiled them instead. Also, it was 70% there.

The chef’s kiss?

It depends on the recipe. It has difficulty with nuances and, like other AI tools, tends to make up for it if not sure. It’s a handy little app that can be used to inspire new ideas and ingredient inventions, or if you’re at a restaurant and don’t want to bother the waiter with the details of the dish.

But for people with an ounce of skill in the kitchen, SideChef probably isn’t much use — especially for cooks like my wife, who hide it and feel creatively limited by following recipes, let alone AI.