Lunch Eat What

Why it exists

Picking lunch with a group is a solved problem right up until everyone says “anything”. Then it takes twenty minutes.

This is a small React app for the stretch of Novena you can actually walk to and back within a lunch hour.

What it does

You narrow the list down by the things that usually rule places out:

• cuisine
• budget
• dietary needs: vegetarian, vegan, halal, gluten-free
• how long the food takes to arrive
• the kind of meal it is, from quick eats to something you’d sit down for

Whatever survives the filters goes into a spin. One place comes out. The point is to end the conversation, not to find the optimal restaurant.

How the list stays current

The app ships with a local list of places within about 800m of Novena. There’s also a Cloudflare Worker that pulls the same area from Google Places, caches the result in KV and refreshes it on a monthly cron, so the list doesn’t slowly rot as places close.

Status

Live at lunch-eat-what.pages.dev. Built for a specific office and a specific lunch hour, so the list only covers Novena, but the filters and the spin work for anyone who opens it.