Using with ChatGPT
ChatGPT supports MCP servers natively through its connector platform. Once you add Platebreaker, you can search recipes, look up nutrition data, and filter by diet or cuisine right from the conversation.
Requirements
Section titled “Requirements”You need a ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscription. Free accounts don’t support MCP connections. You also need a Platebreaker account to authenticate.
Adding Platebreaker to ChatGPT
Section titled “Adding Platebreaker to ChatGPT”Open ChatGPT and go to Settings. Under the Connected apps section (or look for MCP in the sidebar), click Add to connect a new MCP server.
Enter the server URL: https://mcp.platebreaker.com
ChatGPT handles the rest automatically — it discovers the OAuth endpoints, registers as a client, and prompts you to sign in. When the Platebreaker login screen appears, sign in with your Platebreaker account and authorize the connection.
That’s it. The connection persists across sessions, so you only set this up once. ChatGPT now has access to the four Platebreaker tools and can call them during any conversation.
What You Can Ask
Section titled “What You Can Ask”Just ask naturally. ChatGPT figures out which tools to call based on your question.
- “Find me high-protein vegetarian dinner recipes under 30 minutes”
- “What’s the full nutrition breakdown for that lentil soup?”
- “Show me Italian pasta recipes that are gluten-free”
- “What cuisines can I filter by?”
- “Find recipes from Serious Eats published in the last month”
Behind the scenes, ChatGPT calls searchRecipes for finding matches, getRecipeDetail for nutrition breakdowns, and getFilterOptions or getTopTags when it needs to look up available filters. You don’t need to know any of that — just ask your question.
Recipe Card Widgets
Section titled “Recipe Card Widgets”Recipe results show up as interactive cards rather than plain text. Each card has the recipe title, source, prep time, and rating, and you can scroll through them horizontally.
The cards support infinite scroll. As you reach the end of visible results, more load automatically. This is considerably faster than asking ChatGPT to run a new search — pagination fetches directly from the server in about 100-200ms, compared to 2-5 seconds for a full tool call. Click any card to see the full ingredient list and nutrition information.
Filters and Tags
Section titled “Filters and Tags”Platebreaker has hundreds of cuisine tags, dozens of diet tags, and various category and cooking method tags. ChatGPT discovers these automatically, but knowing the basics helps.
Under the hood, tags use prefixes: cu: for cuisine (cu:Italian), di: for diet (di:Vegetarian), ca: for category (ca:Dinner), me: for cooking method (me:Grilled). You don’t need to type these yourself. Say “Italian vegetarian dinner recipes” and ChatGPT handles the formatting.
There are three filter modes: any (OR), required (AND), and exclude (NOT). Asking for “Italian or Mexican vegetarian recipes” applies OR across the cuisines and AND for the diet.
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”ChatGPT asks me to sign in every time. This usually means the token expired. Tokens last one hour. Reconnect through Settings to get a fresh token.
“Unable to connect” error. Check that you entered the URL correctly: https://mcp.platebreaker.com. If the server is temporarily unavailable, wait a few minutes and try again.
No results for my search. Try broader terms. If you searched for something very specific like “Sicilian eggplant caponata with pine nuts,” try “eggplant caponata” instead. Also check that your filter combination isn’t too restrictive — requiring five tags at once can eliminate all results.
Recipe cards aren’t loading. This is usually a browser issue. Try refreshing the page. The widget requires JavaScript and runs in a sandboxed iframe.