Who is Watching You Eat?

Many of the seminal papers in preference handling have used food preferences as motivating examples for their work. As foodies, the authors find this particularly motivating. While we think that there is both research and commercial potential in preference-based software for restaurants, we believe that serious application of the MPREF community's technology to the problem of personal preference-driven presentation of menus, seating, etc., will require significant further innovation. We broadly survey the current use of preferences in making the dining-out experience more enjoyable, and we look at the states of the art for preference representation and reasoning, and for restaurant software. We illustrate some of our points with a short story.