New York Public Library What's On The Menu

aid: new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu
name: New York Public Library What's On The Menu
description: The New York Public Library's What's On The Menu project is a crowdsourced digital collection of over 17,000 historical
  restaurant menus from the New York City area dating back to the 1850s, with more than 1.3 million transcribed dishes. The
  dataset is modeled as four related entities (Menu, MenuPage, MenuItem, Dish) and distributed as bulk CSV downloads. A companion
  HTTP API formerly provided programmatic access to menus, pages, and dishes; the live site and api.menus.nypl.org were retired
  in January 2025, but the crowdsourced dataset remains available as a gzip archive on Amazon S3 alongside a data dictionary.
kind: contract
position: Consuming
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg
tags:
  - Libraries
  - Menus
  - Restaurants
  - History
  - Open Data
  - Food
  - Datasets
  - Cultural Heritage
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2024-11-14'
modified: '2026-06-03'
specificationVersion: '0.19'
apis:
  - aid: new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu:new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu
    name: NYPL What's On The Menu API
    description: The NYPL What's On The Menu API exposed the full Menus dataset for programmatic exploration. Endpoints covered
      menus and their pages, dishes, search across both, and filtering by year, status, and other properties. Responses were
      JSON or XML, with token-based authentication, daily rate limits, and pagination headers. The live API at api.menus.nypl.org
      was retired in January 2025; the OpenAPI definition here documents the historical contract, and the four-table CSV dataset
      (Menu, MenuPage, MenuItem, Dish) remains downloadable from the Amazon S3 archive as the durable data interface.
    humanURL: http://nypl.github.io/menus-api/
    baseURL: http://api.menus.nypl.org
    tags:
    - Libraries
    - Menus
    - Restaurants
    - History
    - Open Data
    properties:
    - type: Documentation
      url: http://nypl.github.io/menus-api/
    - type: OpenAPI
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/openapi/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-openapi-original.yaml
    - type: Project Site
      url: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu
    - type: DataAPI
      url: https://s3.amazonaws.com/menusdata.nypl.org/gzips/
    - type: DataDictionary
      url: http://curatingmenus.org/data_dictionary/
    - type: JSONSchema
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/json-schema/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-menu-schema.json
    - type: JSONSchema
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/json-schema/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-menu-page-schema.json
    - type: JSONSchema
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/json-schema/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-menu-item-schema.json
    - type: JSONSchema
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/json-schema/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-dish-schema.json
    - type: JSONStructure
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/json-structure/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-dataset-structure.json
    - type: JSONLD
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/json-ld/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-context.jsonld
    - type: Vocabulary
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/refs/heads/main/vocabulary/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu-vocabulary.yml
    contact:
    - FN: NYPL Menus Project
      email: menus@nypl.org
common:
  - type: GitHubOrganization
    url: https://github.com/NYPL
  - type: Website
    url: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu
  - type: Documentation
    url: http://nypl.github.io/menus-api/
  - type: DataDictionary
    url: http://curatingmenus.org/data_dictionary/
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com