The semantic of the relationship doesn’t look right. I think it should be something like:
class Restaurant(db.Model):
...
dishes = db.relationship('Dish', secondary=restaurant_dish,
backref=db.backref('restaurants'))
Then, to retrieve all the dishes for a restaurant, you can do:
x = Dish.query.filter(Dish.restaurants.any(name=name)).all()
This should generate a query like:
SELECT dish.*
FROM dish
WHERE
EXISTS (
SELECT 1
FROM restaurant_dish
WHERE
dish.id = restaurant_dish.dish_id
AND EXISTS (
SELECT 1
FROM restaurant
WHERE
restaurant_dish.restaurant_id = restaurant.id
AND restaurant.name = :name
)
)