Menu OCR API
Turn restaurant menu photos and PDFs into dishes, descriptions, prices and sections for delivery apps and listings.
Result
Your Markdown or JSON shows up here.
What makes menus hard to read
- Decorative fonts and multi-column layouts
- Prices that sit far from the dish name
- Menus in several languages at once
What you can pull out
menu fields
{
"restaurant": "Trattoria Lucia",
"sections[]": "name, items[]",
"item_name": "Tagliatelle al ragù",
"description": "Slow-cooked beef and pork ragù",
"price": "24.00",
"currency": "EUR",
"dietary_tags": "vegetarian, gluten-free"
}Best models for menus
1Gemini FlashGeneral vision model with strong handwriting and layout understanding at a low price.
google/gemini-flash3 credits / page2GPTGeneral vision model. Good at messy scans and following extraction instructions.openai/gpt11 credits / page3ClaudeGeneral vision model with careful reading of long, dense documents.anthropic/claude14 credits / pageCall it from your code
curl https://api.ocrrouter.ai/v1/ocr \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OCRROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "google/gemini-flash",
"file_url": "https://example.com/invoice.pdf",
"format": "json"
}'