[Phemist]

These menu websites obviously track the living hell out of you and now they can tie restaurant food preferences to everything else they have already gathered.

A waiter recording your order is at a completely different, much smaller scale. Additionally, the waiter is an anonymizing wall between the system that records my order and me and will only correlate orders across multiple visits to the same restaurant. Not potentially across single visits to multiple, geographically highly separated, restaurants.

[hot_gril]

The waiter inputs your order to their point-of-sale system, which can do similar things as an online menu. If you pay with credit card, it's tied to your identity and will be used for targeting ads.