Location: Machine Room

Solution to Takeout Ordering

by Adam Rosenfield

Answer: ON THE WALL

Decode the cents in the prices using A=1/Z=26 to spell the clue INDEX DOLLARS INTO THE DESCS.

Indexing the dollar amounts into the dish descriptions spells the clue READ CHINESE NOT UTF SIXTEEN.

The Chinese characters are complete nonsense — encoding them into UTF-16 (big-endian) and looking at the raw bytes yields the a sequence of ASCII values. For example, "卯牴" is the two characters U+536F, U+7274, which is 53 6F 72 74 in ASCII, or "Sort". Doing this for all of the Chinese characters yields the clue phrase SortDishesByCostNextConvertDishNamesToNumbersAIsOneBIsTwoCIsThreeEtcFinallyAddUpNumbersModuloTwentySix.

Performing that transformation yields the final clue phrase THE WRITING IS BLANK FOR OMEN, which leads to the answer ON THE WALL.