Nobody knows
what to order.

You sit down. You open the menu. And it starts.

Chicken's safe. Chicken's always safe. But if I'm having chicken, why did I come here. Everyone else is looking at the fish. Is the fish a lot? That's a lot. What was that thing on the board outside. Is that what this place is famous for, or is that just what they've got too much of. Fourteen things on here. Fifteen if you count the one with the little chilli next to it, and I don't know how hot their chilli means. I had noodles yesterday. Do I want noodles two days running. He's coming back over. He's coming back over.

“Chicken, please.”

Nobody talks about that minute, but everybody has it. And it never gets solved. It just gets ended, by the waiter arriving.

I watched it from the outside at a table in Canggu. Four of us. One of them read the rating out loud, hoping it would decide for him. Four point four, hundreds of reviews, everyone says it's great.

It changed nothing. He'd already chosen the restaurant. He was sitting in it.

Every one of those hundreds of reviews was about the building, or the decor, or the service. Not one of them was about the fourteen things on the menu in front of him.

That's the gap. There is an entire internet for working out where to eat, and almost nothing for the decision you actually make when you get there.

They went round the table twice and ordered more or less at random.

Easy to blame that on two of them having just landed in Indonesia for the first time. But the loudest version of that minute I've ever had was in a place I'd eaten in twenty times. Knowing the menu isn't the problem. Knowing which of the fourteen is the one. That's the problem.

I knew what to get that night. I'd like to tell you that was taste. It wasn't. My friends had been telling me for years, and none of us had noticed.

Everyone I knew scattered. Jakarta, Durham, London, a couple stuck in places they hadn't planned to be. The group chat died the way group chats do.

So we started a shared story. One rule: post what you're eating.

Nobody was eating out. Nobody could. So every plate on there was somebody's own cooking.

The first thing anyone put up was a pan of shakshuka. Eggs in tomato sauce, feta on top, bread on the side, cooked in a flat by someone with nowhere to go.

It wasn't food photography. It was proof of life. Every day someone put up a plate and every day the rest of us saw it. It was the one place we could all still sit at the same table.

For about a year the story was just cooking. Somebody's shakshuka. Somebody's fourth go at bread. Whatever was in the fridge.

Then places opened, and the plates started coming from somewhere you could actually go.

That's when it started doing something we never asked it to.

Someone would post a plate, and someone else would ask where it was. Not out of politeness. They wanted to go. And when they went, they didn't just go to the restaurant. They ordered the same dish.

It kept happening for years. Nobody ever posted asking the group what they should get. It worked the other way round: you saw what somebody you actually knew had actually eaten, and you ordered that.

It would be neat to say I spotted it and built it. I didn't.

I built a food diary. That is genuinely what I thought I had. A good way to keep the meals. The calendar, the photo grid, a website about remembering. All of it pointing backwards. Years of it.

The behaviour never changed. I was just slow to see what it was.

What made me see it was sitting at that table watching four people fail at the exact thing my phone had been quietly doing for me for years, and not one of them knew it was possible. The thing we'd built by accident answered a question nothing else did. It just wasn't the question we'd been describing.

You save what you eat. Not to keep it. So the app learns what you'd choose again.

Eat or Yeet puts two of your own meals side by side and asks which you'd order first. Your answers build a picture of your taste that nobody else can see.

Then, at a menu, it starts with your own evidence. When your own evidence runs out, it goes to people you chose to trust.

Which is the shared story, with the guessing taken out.

Makan went live on 19 June 2026, with 5,635 meals saved so far.

Some of the people who started that story in lockdown are still on it. Same thing they were doing in 2020. Putting a plate up so somebody else knows what to order. It just has a name now.