Purpose – The purpose of this study is to gather insights into digital consumer behaviour related to Chinese restaurents by examining visual contents on Tripadvisor platform. Design/methodology/approach – Using the deep learning approach, this research assessed consumer-posted online content of dining experiences by implementing image analysis and clustering. Text mining using word cloud analysis revealed the most frequently repeated keywords. Findings – First, 4,000 photos of nine Chinese restaurants posted on Tripadvisor’s website were analyzed using image recognition via Inception V3 and Google’s deep learning network; this revealed 12 hierarchical image clusters. Then, an open-questionnaire survey of 125 Chinese respondents investigated consumers’ information needs before visiting a restaurant and after purchasing behavior (motives to share). Practical implications – This study contributes to culinary marketing development by introducing a new analysis methodology and demonstrating its application by exploring a wide range of keywords and visual images published on the internet. Originality/value – This research extends and contributes to the literature regarding visual user-generated content in culinary tourism.