Grandma's recipe notebook nobody had the courage to retype

A notebook with forty years of grease stains

When Grandma Rosa left the kitchen of Restaurante São Roque in the hands of her grandson Duarte, she also left a notebook with a worn cover, holding forty years of handwritten recipes — some complete, others with just "a pinch of this, a splash of that", trusting that whoever's cooking will know how to get it right.

Duarte had wanted to put those recipes into Mise en Place for over a year, just to finally know the real cost of every dish on the menu. But every time he opened the notebook to get started, he'd close it again: there were over forty recipes, each with ten or twelve ingredients, and the idea of typing them all into a computer by hand never quite fit into a normal working day.

Our heroes

The task that never quite got started

It wasn't a lack of will — it was the sheer size of the task. Typing forty recipes, ingredient by ingredient, quantity by quantity, is the kind of work that always seems like it can wait until next week. And next week had its own lunch and dinner service to get through.

It was Bia who asked, one day, whether they could just photograph each page of the notebook with a phone, instead of copying it out by hand.

From photo to draft, without typing anything

In Mise en Place, the "Import" button on Dishes and Preparations accepts exactly that: a photo (or a PDF) of a recipe, taken with a phone. The app reads the page, identifies the dish's name, ingredients and quantities, and creates a draft right away — marked as such, so it never enters any calculation on its own before someone reviews it.

Page by page, Grandma Rosa's notebook turned into drafts in the catalogue: Duarte only had to confirm quantities, turn the odd "pinch" into an exact value, and approve. No recipe got left behind — and none had to be typed from scratch.

Forty recipes later, the notebook is safe

Grandma Rosa's notebook is still on the kitchen shelf, worn cover and all — but it's no longer the only copy of her recipes that exists. They're all in Mise en Place now, with cost calculated, ready for a spec sheet, and safe from the day one more grease stain decides the cover can't take it anymore.

Photo recipe import is part of the Mise en Place app, where Restaurante São Roque also organises its catalogue, calculates the cost of every dish, and prints the spec sheet for each of Grandma Rosa's recipes — all from the same digital catalogue.