MenuFindr | Restaurant Menu Search Engine

The problem

You want pad thai. Which Sacramento restaurants have it? Good luck finding out. You would need to check dozens of individual restaurant websites, many with menus buried in PDFs or hopelessly outdated pages. Yelp and Google Maps let you search restaurants, but you cannot search by dish. The question “who has good chicken mole near me?” should not take 20 minutes to answer.

What I built

MenuFindr flips restaurant search around. Instead of picking a restaurant and then reading its menu, you search for a dish and see which nearby restaurants serve it, with pricing and descriptions. The app collects menu data from Sacramento-area restaurants and makes it all searchable in one place.

How it works

The backend runs on Cloudflare Workers for fast edge-deployed responses. TypeScript covers the full data pipeline from menu ingestion and normalization through to the search API. Menu data is indexed for full-text search with fuzzy matching, because restaurants spell “margherita” and “margarita” differently and the search needs to handle that. The architecture is designed to expand to other cities without major infrastructure changes.

Where it stands

MenuFindr is under active development with the Sacramento metro area as the first market. The search engine and menu data pipeline are functional. I am working on expanding restaurant coverage and tuning the search relevance. Early testing confirms that dish-first search is the way people actually want to find restaurants.