What is fridge-chef?

fridge-chef is a Telegram bot that turns a photo of the inside of your fridge into three recipe suggestions based on what it can see. You send the bot a picture, and it replies with dishes you could cook using those ingredients, generated by Google's Gemini AI model. The bot runs as a single Docker container and connects to Telegram using long polling, which means it does not need a public server address, a domain name, or any open network ports to work. Photos are analyzed by the cheaper gemini-2.5-flash-lite model first, if that call fails, it retries twice with a short delay between attempts, and if it still fails it falls back to the slightly larger gemini-2.5-flash model once before giving up and reporting an error back in the chat. If several photos are sent together as an album, they are treated as one fridge and combined into a single set of three recipe suggestions rather than three separate replies. Recipes come back in Turkish by default, but adding an English caption to the photo switches the reply to English, and any caption is also read as a constraint, so a note like vegetarian or quick can shape which recipes come back. The bot keeps a small SQLite database of previously suggested dish names so it avoids repeating a recipe within the last five days, shared across everyone allowed to use the bot, and a /recent command lists what has been suggested lately while /forget clears that history. Only Telegram user IDs added to an allowlist can use the bot at all, and setup involves creating a bot through BotFather, getting a Gemini API key, filling in an environment file, then starting it with docker compose.