I've sat with the menu in front of me, written in a language I barely understood, while everyone else at the table already knew what they were ordering. I was still trying to work out what was in each dish and whether it was worth asking the waiter.
It's exactly for situations like this that I wanted the menu scan in MyHistamate to work when I'm not at home too.
If the menu is in another language
You photograph it exactly the same way as a menu in Romanian.
You don't have to choose the language or change anything in the app settings. MyHistamate reads the text in the menu, and the result shows you both the name of the dish in its original form and a short translation.
That way I understand what the dish is, but at the same time I keep the name the waiter sees on the menu.
Because reading “oven-baked sea bream” in the app is one thing, and then trying to explain in Greek what I want to order is another. It's much simpler to be able to point at the dish exactly as it appears on the menu.
The app shortens your list, but you still have to ask
After it reads the menu, MyHistamate tries to bring forward the options that look more suitable for your profile.
But a menu doesn't say everything. It doesn't always say whether an ingredient was marinated, how fresh the fish is, whether the sauce contains wine, or whether a dish was made earlier and reheated.
That's why, even after scanning, I still ask the waiter a few short questions. What the app mainly helps with is that I no longer start from twenty dishes. It narrows my options down to a few worth checking further, and it suggests what to ask next.
I've gathered the questions I use in the guide on how I read a restaurant menu.
If the menu has several pages
You don't have to pick a single photo. You can send several photos of the same menu, and the app analyses them together.
From my point of view, it's far more useful to take three or four clear photos, section by section, than a single one where I try to cram in the whole menu and nothing can be read any more. Even if you use several photos, they're treated as a single menu scan.
And if the image is too blurry to be read, the app tells you so before it tries to draw conclusions from text it can't see properly.
Scans can run out faster on holiday
At home, if you eat out now and then, the number of scans in your plan can be enough for a whole month. On holiday it's a different story.
Breakfast out, lunch at another restaurant, dinner somewhere else — you can end up using the scan several times in a single day. That's why MyHistamate plans include different numbers of scans, and for the periods when you need more there are additional packs. So you don't have to change your plan just because you're going away for ten days.
The simplest way to save scans
On holiday, I often end up going back to the restaurants I liked. And this is where the history helps. Once you've scanned a menu, the analysis stays saved. If you return to the same place, you can reopen the menu from your history instead of photographing it again.
That means a restaurant you go to three times doesn't have to mean three scans.
What the scan can and can't do
The fact that the app can read menus in other languages doesn't mean it knows everything that happens in the kitchen. It analyses the information it has: the name of the dish, the ingredients written on the menu and your tolerance profile.
It can't check freshness, the exact way something was stored, or ingredients that aren't mentioned.
So I see the scan as help with the first selection, not as a guarantee that a dish can't cause symptoms.
If you want to see exactly how the whole process works, I've described separately how I scan a menu at a restaurant.
A holiday is more than what I eat
I've also noticed that when I go away, it's not only the food that changes. I sleep differently. I spend more time in the sun or in the heat. I walk more. I eat at different hours. I might drink something I wouldn't drink at home. Sometimes I'm simply more tired from the travelling.
So if symptoms turn up, I try not to automatically put it all down to the last restaurant.
For me it helped to see the holiday as a whole context, not just as a series of meals. I've written more about that in HIT in a life on the move.
MyHistamate is on the App Store and Google Play
The app has come out of testing and can be installed from the App Store and Google Play.
The first seven days are free and complete, with no card.
Before, in a restaurant abroad, I almost always started from zero: translation, Google, my list of foods, questions.
Now I still have to ask, and I still have to know my tolerances.
It's just that I no longer have to decipher the whole menu on my own before I can start.