CHICAGO, Ill. — There is a particular look in a customer’s eye when the burger on the menu has six layers of cheese, none of which appear to be supported by anything, and the bun is doing something that buns, as far as anyone can tell, do not do in real life. That look has become, over the past several weeks, the defining expression of the American deli, as restaurants across the country have begun swapping their food photos for AI-generated images and a large share of the public has formed, on the record, a very strong opinion about it.

The phenomenon, which food writers have taken to calling “slop,” is now showing up on real menus at real brick-and-mortar locations, and the response has been swift, loud, and, in a number of cases, directed at a deli owner who did not, by his own account, even know the pictures were wrong.

"I didn't order a lake. I ordered a burger. It came with a lake. I'm eating the lake now."

One regular, speaking on condition of the name being printed but the specific deli not being, said he now walks into the shop and does what he called “a full check.” “You look at the cheese. You look at the bun. You look at the thing the bun is doing. And then you decide,” he said. “Last week I decided. The burger looked like it had opinions. I got a sandwich.”

The owners, for their part, have been described as anything but apologetic. Several have said, in a phrase that has since been repeated in a number of interviews, that the AI pictures “sell more food,” a claim that one diner tested by ordering exactly what the picture showed and describing the result, on camera, as “a structural event.”

THE SLOP MENU: FIELD REPORT

  • The cheese: Now appears in quantities that do not correspond to real cheese.
  • The bun: Doing something. No one has confirmed what.
  • The customer: Forming an opinion, on the record, in real time.
  • The deli owner: "The picture sells. The picture is doing its job."

Food scientists, when asked, have been careful. One noted that the images are not, technically, a food-safety problem, which is “true, and also not the point, because the point is that a lot of people are now standing in a line wondering if the burger is real, and the line is the real thing.”

At press time, at least one deli was reported to have added a small note beneath the menu screen reading “Photos may not reflect the actual product, or actual physics,” which one regular described, after reading it, as “the most honest sentence in the building.”