You’d end up with quite a few creative dishes I would imagine. It could be the “renaissance” era of cooking!

Are there any restaurants out there that do this already?

outsource the menu to the “recipedians”,
the rcpd-ans bring their own food,
GOFS chefs prepare the meal for free,

and Google monetizes the operation with Adsense listings on the chef and waitstaff uniforms which are embedded with fiberoptics…..

Don’t know if you’ve seen today’s Washington Post food section, but there’s a story about a crowdsourced restaurant in the making.

OK, well, Firebowl doesn’t let you bring your own stuff, nor does it have a recipe community per se. But it has an open veggie bar, several different noodle/rice choices, several different sauces, from black bean to ginger to fire, and 4-5 meat options. Recently I’ve been choosing my veggies by getting just a few from as many different veggies as possible to maximize diversity (my favorite bread’s also like that).

North Austinites be warned, you have to go to the one at Lamar and Westgate; the one up north doesn’t do this. Hmm, now I’m wanting to go again tonight….

Perfect description, thats truely the way it would be !

Seafood restaurants like what you described are very common in Hong Kong.

In fact you don’t even have to buy the ingredients from the restaurant. You can pick your own seafood shop, go there and choose your seafood from the water tanks. You pay for the seafood you chose and have them sent over to your restaurant.

Back at the restaurant you tell them how you’d like to have your food made and they’ll cook it exactly the way you want. The restaurant charges a “cooking fee”, as well as a corkage if you’re also bringing your own wine.

Google is about as far away from “open and transparent” as you can get.

Their search engine is completely proprietary. None of their algorithm is open source. If you’re an AdSense publisher, the amount of information you receive from Google is pretty much zero. You get a check from Google, that’s it. Google won’t tell you what proportion of the ad revenue they’ve kept for themselves.

Google is one of the most secretive corporations in the world.

A restaurant runs on Googlethink would:
- have no menu. You will eat whatever the servers bring to you. They’re not going to tell you the name of the dishes
- forget about asking about the ingredients either
- there will also be no published prices. You give the restaurant your credit card number. At the end of the month you’ll get your credit card statement and you’ll find out how much the restaurant has decided to charge you.

lots of street vendors like this in thailand …

Puff, that Mongolian Grille place is more like a buffet (the small variety of food choices have been mostly made for you).

I’m thinking this could work as one of those Japanese restaurants where they cook the food in front of the group as you talk. Imagine bringing a bunch of ingredients to the chef and saying “Surprise me.”

There’d be enough ingredients already on hand to get a bare bones meal, and I would think the chefs would somewhat like not cooking the same meal all that often.

Post the Best Experimental Dish of the Week and the Worst too. Buy mostly local, not only to strengthen the community ties, but because the local supply changes every week.

There’s a restaurant like that in Dalian in Northern China. Huge fish and seafood place where everything is live and in tanks, you go round pointing at stuff then the chef comes to your table and asks how you want it cooked. Next to the kempinski hotel, amazing place.

You go in and get a supermarket cart. You shop for all the ingredients (fish, shrimp, crabs, salad, potatoes, etc) and then pay for it. You then cart it all to your table and a waiter comes by and asks how you want it all cooked. They basically were ready to do every type of dish you wanted (eg. grilled, sautéed, teriyaki, sushi, fries, you name it) took your cart and 20 minutes later you had your meal.

I am still surprised that I have never seen that type of restaurant anywhere else in the world!