Random food generator — what should I eat tonight?

How to use the random food generator

1. Choose a Cuisine, or leave it on Any to draw from all 162 dishes.
2. Set How many ideas you want, from 1 to 20.
3. Leave No repeats ticked so the ideas are all different.
4. Press Generate. Each idea shows the dish and its cuisine.

What it does and when to use it

“What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t mind, you choose.” This tool breaks that loop. Use it to settle a takeaway order, plan a week of home cooking (draw seven, cook one a day), pick a theme for a dinner party, or try a cuisine you have never cooked. Another option is to draw three ideas and let everyone vote.

If some meals should come up more often, give them weights in the weighted random picker. To settle a family argument with something more theatrical, put the options on the spinner wheel. For a film to watch with the meal, try the random movie genre generator.

How it works

The dishes are a fixed list stored in the page, each tagged with one cuisine. The tool keeps the dishes for your chosen cuisine, then either shuffles them and takes the first ones (No repeats) or draws each idea independently. The random numbers come from crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling, so each dish in the pool has the same chance. With Any, cuisines with more dishes come up more often, because the draw is by dish, not by cuisine.

Worked examples

A small cuisine. Ethiopian with How many 5 returns both Ethiopian dishes, Doro wat and Injera with lentils, and the note “Only 2 items match, so you get all of them.”

Peruvian night. Peruvian with How many 5 gives all three Peruvian dishes, Ají de gallina, Lomo saltado and Ceviche, in random order.

One idea from anywhere. Any with How many 1 gave Banh mi · Vietnamese in one run.

Limits and tips

• Dish names are common English or original names; spellings vary between menus.
• Each cuisine has only a handful of its best-known dishes, not its whole range.
• Everything runs in your browser.