ChefBook

Inspiration

I’ve always been fascinated by automation and agentic workflows — where the system just “gets things done” for you. After seeing Andrej Karpathy’s side project app, which added images to menus to help understand what to order, I thought: why stop at images? What if restaurant owners could get an entire portfolio built for them with just a few menu scans?

What it does

ChefBook lets restaurant owners scan their menu and get a complete digital portfolio in minutes. It uses AI to generate dish descriptions, fetch images, and even enables online ordering. There's a dashboard to manage items, view analytics, and keep things updated — all without needing to hire a dev or designer.

How we built it

Frontend: Personally being more of a backend & GenAi dev I let Bolt lead the frontend side with react + vite + tailwind combo Backend: Node.js + Express with MongoDB for storage AI: Used Gemini for text generation and Unsplash API for image generation Extras: Built MVP demo level online ordering, portfolio dashboard & analytics section.

Challenges we ran into

Getting accurate and appealing images through APIs (initially tried SerpAPI, later switched to Unsplash for quality & higher free tier credits). Maintaining UX flow while handling async AI/image tasks. Building image scanner -> ai -> portfolio pipelines. Finetuning ai responses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a complete full-stack platform from scan to portfolio to checkout Made it so anyone with a menu can go digital in minutes — no tech skills needed Achieved a sleek, modern UI that feels like a real product Managed to combine AI + practical UX in a way that feels useful, not just cool

What we learned

How to plug AI into real-world flows and make it usable UI/UX decisions matter way more when you're replacing manual effort You can go from an idea to an entire product quickly if you keep it focused and solve a clear pain point Working with AI powered developement & to work with ai made codebases.

What's next for ChefBook

Builder user auth flow. Integrating WhatsApp or SMS updates for restaurant owners Mobile support and scan-from-camera flow to improve onboarding Taking all features from Demo Level MVP to actual features.