Call for Contribution: Help us find local and regional menus!

In this post, we discuss how you can contribute images of menus to the Dish by Dish project. We welcome menus from the larger Arabian Gulf region in any language and for any cuisine.

All of the menus that you see in the Dish by Dish project come from scans or photos of menus, sourced from volunteers and project team members. As of the end of May 2023, we had a total of 200 menus amounting to more than 1300 pages ready for transcription. It has been estimated that there are about 134,000 establishments in the food and beverage sector in the GCC (Marmore, 2021). We need your help to increase our number of menus!

Here are some suggestions for contributing menus:

• If you find an interesting menu online, you can submit the link to us here.

• If you are in a restaurant and find any interesting menus (takeaway, dine in, buffet), you can take a picture of it with your smartphone and submit those images as is here.

• If you have a copy on your own laptop and are able to put those images together as a pdf, you can also submit the images as one file here. We have a naming convention for our files (Language1_Language2_LanguageX_difficultyLevel_shortNameofRestaurant.pdf).

We will review your submissions for how well they will work for the Dish by Dish exercise. If you would like to be acknowledged for your contribution, we will be happy to do so on our team page.

As a practice, we only keep the menus on the platform for the time that it takes to transcribe and review them fully. After that we take down the menu.

Thank you for your contributions!