> To be fair, I have been surprised many times how difficult it can be to find an online menu for places I like in my area. Lots of places might not even have a website, but in these cases, I actually use GrubHub and the like to read the menus only.

Don't. Do. This.

Grubhub menus are often incomplete (and we all know the prices are wrong). I just checked a nearby restaurant I often frequent and the items I usually buy are not on the Grubhub menu.

If they don't have a web site and you want to see the menu:

Go to either the Google Maps listing or the Yelp listing.

If Yelp, don't click on the menu if they have one within Yelp.

Instead, click on the photos. You'll almost always find photos of the menu uploaded by Yelp users.

Just FYI, the menu photos on Yelp are not guaranteed to be up to date, either. The only real way to see what the restaurant's actual menu is without going there is if they have it up on their own website.

> Just FYI, the menu photos on Yelp are not guaranteed to be up to date, either

That's true, but rare. If there are no recent photos of the menu, then there's a good chance not many people eat there.

In any case, Grubhub menus are probably more likely to be inaccurate than those photos.

It's more common than you think though. I know of restaurants that change their menus daily or weekly. Most don't, but you will run into it if you eat at enough places, and I highly doubt someone is going to post a new photo of the menu every week.

Or just ask the human being on the phone with you if $ITEM is still being offered for $PRICE. The beauty of communicating with humans instead of machines is there are no rules, you're allowed to go 'off script' like that.

I’ve tried the menus on Google maps as well, but found them to be even more inaccurate than various delivery services. I assume if a restaurant maintains their google presence they can edit their menu by hand but this seems to be rare. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere these ‘menus’ are auto-generated by ML algorithms based on the photos of food people post.

Which actually, is pretty impressive when you think about it. It’s not worthless. Even if not totally accurate, it will give you a rough idea of the most popular dishes!

Weren’t Grubhub also found stuffing their routing phone number for unclaimed restaurants in Google Maps?

>Also, I have never had a restaurant ask me for a card over the phone.

If you want to pay for delivery (not pickup) with a credit card and the restaurant doesn't have online ordering then you'd read the credit card over the phone. Of course you have to say the words "I'd like to pay with credit," otherwise they'll assume you'll pay cash on delivery. Really standard before online ordering became big.

Some restaurants even have a POS system that when you've used a credit card in the past to pay for a delivery order with the phone number/address combination your using for your current order they'll ask you "would you like to use Visa ending in 1234?"

As an aside I didn't know it was a thing until I overheard my roommate doing it. This was 15 years ago now.

Some restaurants won't do that, I assume because for many payment providers a lot of card not present transactions will lead to increased fees.

> Restaurant owners are usually not tech people

I think a lot of the lashback things like grubhub, uber eats is getting lately is precisely because people have become more tech savvy. The "magic" of the app isn't magic anymore to the current generation of users, and they just don't see the value in it that the previous one did.

My opinion: As it becomes more and more commonplace to have "just enough" technical expertise and the tooling is easy enough to DIY, we're going to see services like grubhub become commodified and open - and they know it, so they're doing everything they can to try to keep as much market share as possible.

You can almost always find a picture of the menu on Google maps as well.