# New York Public Library What's On The Menu

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/  
**Website:** https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu  
**APIs profiled:** 2

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.

## Kin Score — 34.4 / 100 (thin)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 34.4).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 68.5 |
| Contract Quality | 64.3 |
| Governance | 9.8 |
| Contract Governance | 9.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 10.5 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 21.4 |
| Commercial Clarity | 15.8 |
| Access Clarity | 15.8 |

Regulatory layer — **Government & Public Sector**: 31.5 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 34.7 (agent-ready)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | na |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | na |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | na |

## Access

Freemium · Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: freemium, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (2)

- **New York Public Library What's On The Menu Dishes API** — Dish records appearing across menus.
- **New York Public Library What's On The Menu Menus API** — Historical menu records and pages.

## Agentic access (1)

- **New York Public Library Whats On The Menu Agentic Access** — 9 operations

## Security (2)

- **New York Public Library Whats On The Menu Authentication** — apiKey · 1 scheme
- **New York Public Library Whats On The Menu Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **New York Public Library Whats On The Menu Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Libraries, Menus, Restaurant, History, Open Data, Food, Datasets, Cultural Heritage

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/new-york-public-library-whats-on-the-menu/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.