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