Who Is Watching you eat?

Many of the seminal papers in preference handling have used food preferences as motivating examples for their work; for example (Boutilier et al. 2004; Chomicki 2002). 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.