Ok, I'll say it. I like the new menu better.
I do not understand the author's aversion. Sure we can talk about "picture of food" vs "what was served" but have you been... anywhere? This is the reality of all food advertisement. I've never in my life been served a plate of food that perfectly matched the picture unless it was a user-uploaded image. Getting a decent idea of what the dish looks like is valuable (especially for unfamiliar cuisine, obviously not unfamiliar to the author but I'd wager unfamiliar to most patrons).
Being anti-LLM/AI for the sake of it is boring. Show me mistakes on the menu or a level of unreality higher than the food industry at large and I'll care but I'm not seeing the problem here.
I feel like we read different articles, because without context, the pictured dish looked like overcooked pork chops served next to a type of carbonara tagliatelle topped with a fried egg & chives. I can't imagine anyone has ever set out to make spamsilog and ended up with the generated dish.
It's different in kind to a "my Big Mac is more squashed than the advert on TV" type situation.
Everything looks brown, it's crammed together, those not-photos make it feel really cramped in the third column, it looks like every other AI-generated menu and it's lost the clarity the old menu had.
And yes, there's a very long history of food places using unrealistic images of someone else's version of the food on the menus. That doesn't mean that it's okay to now use LLM versions of the food, because I never thought it was okay to use those stylised photos either.