Whether you have food allergies or health concerns, if you’re vegan or vegetarian, Atkins or paleo, the Israeli founders of ViewEat want to make your international dining-out experience as easy as possible.
Still in its infancy, the ViewEat project has thus far incorporated ingredient information publicly available from dozens of global chain restaurants in about 180,000 locations across the US and UK. That data is updated regularly.
On your desktop or mobile device, enter a search based on the types of food you’re seeking and those you must avoid, and the general location where you want to eat. You’ll get a visual map of menu items marked with a red octagon (avoid), yellow square (meaning traces of the objectionable ingredient could be found or there’s insufficient data) or green circle (safe).
The full menu or selected items, tailored to the users’ criteria, are available as web pages and as a printable PDF.
Roll over the data with your mouse and you’ll see textual data in a choice of eight languages: English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Italian or French. So if you’re an English-speaker at a restaurant in France, you don’t need to know the language in order to make sure what you’re ordering meets your dietary needs.
And it’s all available for free.