Fooder - Tinder, But For Dinner

The most reliable conversation in my house goes like this. “What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t mind, what do you want?” “I asked you first.” Repeat until one of us caves or we give up and eat microwaved burrito standing at the bench.

So I built an app. It’s called Fooder. It’s Tinder, but for dinner, and the entire user base is me and my partner: two people who live in the same apartment and could, in theory, simply talk.

Here’s how it works. We both open the app and blind-swipe through a deck of cuisines. Right for yes, left for that fusion place that closed in 2019. Blind, because if they sees me swipe right on Thai they’ll swipe right on Thai, and then we’ve learned nothing and democracy is dead. Once we’re both done, the server works out the overlap, the cuisines we both said yes to.

If there’s exactly one, congratulations, it’s a match, you’re having Vietnamese, no notes. If there’s none, you get a polite “no overlap” screen, which is the app’s gentle way of telling you that you two need to have a conversation.

And if there’s more than one? A bracket. An actual single-elimination tournament, seeded in deck order, to decide whether tonight is Thai or Mexican. You tap through the pairs, round by round, until one cuisine is left standing. If the final pair ties three times in a row, the one earlier in the deck wins, because at some point someone has to be the adult.

Then it does the whole thing again with restaurants. It pulls real places for the winning cuisine from Google, puts our favorites at the front, and serves them up as another deck. First mutual right-swipe wins, and you get a match screen with a photo, the address, a phone number, and a Maps link. Dinner: decided. Relationship: intact.

The whole thing is real-time over SSE, so you get a little “partner is done swiping” indicator. Which means you can now watch, live, as the person across the sofa from you fails to decide what to eat. Truly we live in the future.

It’s a personal hack, it has tests for the crime of picking dinner, and the source is on GitHub. The actual fix, obviously, is to just answer the question. I wrote tests instead.