Dinner Randomizer

How the randomizer picks

One hundred dinners ship with the wheel, spread across six cuisines — 18 Asian, 17 American, 17 Indian, 17 Mediterranean, 16 Italian and 15 Mexican — and each one carries a cooking time in minutes, an effort band and its dietary tags. A spin filters the list, then picks uniformly at random from whatever is left, so every eligible dinner has exactly the same chance every time. There is no memory: last night's answer is as likely as any other tonight, and nothing is weighted by popularity, season or what you picked before.

The filters are plain intersections. A cuisine keeps that cuisine, vegetarian and vegan each require their own tag, and the quick filter keeps only meals under thirty minutes. Meals you add yourself pass every filter — the tool assumes you know whether your own recipe is vegan and how long it takes — so a heavily filtered wheel can end up mostly yours.

The animation is theatre, and honestly so. The result is chosen before the wheel starts turning; the four-and-a-bit seconds of spinning and the segment that lands under the pointer are there because a decision feels lighter when something else appears to make it. Above sixteen eligible meals the wheel draws sixteen segments and the pointer lands on the nearest one, so the label under the needle is not always the meal you are given — the meal in the card below is the one that was drawn. Your custom dinners and the week you build are saved in this browser.

Every figure above was read out of the code that runs on this page. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published one, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.