PlateAI — AI Menu Maker for Restaurants & Cafes

Turn a plain-text menu into a professionally designed, print-ready menu with AI food photography — in minutes. No designer, no Photoshop.

🌐 Live demo · ⚡ Self-host · 🧠 How it works

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PlateAI is an open-source restaurant menu maker and AI menu generator. Paste your dishes and the AI writes appetizing descriptions, generates realistic AI food photography for each plate, and lays out a dense, print-ready menu — handling categories, columns and pagination automatically. Export a print-ready PDF, or run the whole thing yourself for free.

Great for restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, bars, bakeries and food trucks that want a beautiful menu without hiring a designer.

✨ Features

• 🧠 AI menu parser & copywriter — structures any plain-text menu and writes gourmet descriptions.
• 📸 AI food photography — realistic dish photos via Google Gemini / Imagen, with style presets and prompt-based edits.
• 🎨 AI layout engine — the AI designs a full print-ready menu (categories, two columns, pagination) — 60 dishes fit on ~3 pages, not 25.
• 🗂️ Page composer — compose pages yourself: pick which sections go on each page, add a cover page, even generate an AI cover background image.
• ✍️ Refine by sentence — “put desserts on their own page”, “use two columns”, “make descriptions smaller”.
• 🖨️ Print-ready PDF — server-side rendering (real Chromium) → crisp A4 / US Letter PDF.
• 💳 Optional paywall — a one-time Stripe payment to download (skip it entirely when self-hosting).
• 🔓 Open source & self-hostable — bring your own Google Gemini key, deploy anywhere Node runs.

🧠 How it works

1. Parse — paste or upload your menu as plain text; the AI extracts dishes, categories, prices and writes descriptions.
2. Photograph — generate realistic AI photos of each dish (optional), with style presets.
3. Design — the AI lays out the whole menu in a print-ready style of your choice; compose pages or let it auto-flow.
4. Refine — tweak it with a sentence, or edit text directly.
5. Export — download a print-ready PDF (A4 / US Letter) or a ZIP of images + data.

⚡ Quick start (self-host)

Prerequisites: Node.js 20+ and a free Google Gemini API key — https://aistudio.google.com/apikey

git clone https://github.com/arturayupov/PlateAI.git
cd PlateAI
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local      # then set GEMINI_API_KEY
npm run dev                      # → http://localhost:3000

Production:

npm run build
NODE_ENV=production node dist/server.cjs

💡 When self-hosting, the only required value is GEMINI_API_KEY. The Stripe paywall is optional — if you don't set STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, downloads are simply free.

Environment variables

See .env.example. Secrets never live in the repo — keep them in .env.local locally and in your host's secret manager in production.

Variable	Required	Purpose
GEMINI_API_KEY	✅	Google Gemini key (text + image models)
APP_URL	for payments	Public URL for Stripe redirects
STRIPE_SECRET_KEY	optional	Enables the one-time download paywall
STRIPE_PRICE_ID	optional	The one-time price to charge
ENTITLEMENT_SECRET	optional	Signs download tokens (use a long random string)
FREE_GENERATION_LIMIT	optional	Free AI photos per visitor (default 6)

🚀 Deploy

PlateAI is a standard Node server and ships with a Dockerfile (with Chromium for PDF rendering). It runs on Google Cloud Run, Render, Railway, Fly.io, or any VPS.

Google Cloud Run:

gcloud run deploy plateai --source . --region us-central1 --allow-unauthenticated \
  --set-env-vars APP_URL=https://YOUR_URL,FREE_GENERATION_LIMIT=6 \
  --set-secrets GEMINI_API_KEY=GEMINI_API_KEY:latest

💳 How the paywall works (hosted mode)

No accounts, no logins. Free visitors get a limited number of watermarked AI photo previews (FREE_GENERATION_LIMIT per IP); the clean originals stay on the server. A one-time Stripe Checkout payment issues a short-lived, signed entitlement token that releases the clean, watermark-free images and the print-ready PDF. This bounds API cost (rate limit) and prevents free clean downloads.

🧱 Tech stack

React 19 · TypeScript · Vite 6 · Tailwind v4 · Node/Express · Google Gemini (@google/genai) · Puppeteer (PDF) · jsPDF/JSZip (client export) · Stripe (optional).

🗺️ Roadmap

• “Refine in Canva” export
• More menu styles & fonts
• Multi-language menus
• QR / digital menu output

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md. Please open an issue to discuss significant changes first.

🔒 Security

Found a vulnerability? See SECURITY.md. Never commit secrets — .env* is gitignored.

📄 License

MIT © Artur Ayupov

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_{Keywords: restaurant menu maker, AI menu generator, AI food photography, menu design software, menu maker, cafe menu maker, restaurant menu template, print-ready menu PDF, menu engineering, open-source menu designer.}