The waiter takes your order, nods, and brings out the dish you considered for four seconds and then didn't pick. Not a random substitute. The specific one your eye landed on before you talked yourself into the safe thing.

The hard part isn't the kitchen. The kitchen is trivial — you're cooking from the same menu you already have, you just don't know which item until service. The hard part is detection, and I think the honest answer is that you can't detect it, so you have to construct it instead.

My working approach is a menu designed so that almost-ordering is legible from the outside. Every dish sits adjacent to exactly one other dish that it's the cautious version of. Roast chicken pairs with the offal thing. The pasta everyone gets pairs with the pasta nobody gets. You order, the waiter reads which side of the pair you landed on, and if you picked the safe one you get the other. If you picked the brave one you just get it, because bravery should be honoured rather than punished.

What breaks is that this only works once. Second visit, you know. So you order the safe thing strategically, to get the interesting one, and now the whole apparatus is a vending machine with extra steps. The restaurant has an audience of first-timers and nobody else, which is a bad restaurant.

I've been chewing on whether you fix that with noise — the swap only fires maybe two-thirds of the time, so gaming it is a bet rather than a lever. But that makes it a slot machine, which feels worse. More honest but worse.

The thing I actually can't resolve: is the almost-ordered dish genuinely what you wanted, or is the whole appeal that you never had to find out? Because if it's the second one, then serving it destroys the exact thing it's built on. You'd walk out having learned that you were right to order the chicken.

Which might still be worth twenty-eight pounds.