What's on the Menu?
Update & Project Status
In January 2025, The New York Public Library's “What’s on the Menu” site was retired due to outdated software and hardware, which presented potential cybersecurity risks. Retirement has been delayed several times due to the popularity of the site and its corresponding dataset. More information about the data can be found below.
You can still explore the digitized menu collection in the Digital Collections.
While the original menu site has been retired along with the j2k server and the API, users are encouraged to continue accessing and exploring the crowdsourced data stored here. A data dictionary is available here.
If you'd like to see images of the menus themselves, please view The Buttolph Collection of Menus in the Library’s Digital Collections.
Questions? Contact menus@nypl.org
"What's on the Menu?" History
The "What's on the Menu?" site was a historical milestone for NYPL and represents the first NYPL-built API. The site was a crowdsourced project to transcribe dishes and prices from the Library's collection of digitized menus to create a searchable index and set of visualization tools that show changes in cuisine and prices over time. More than 17,000 of 45,000 menus were digitized for the project. A crowdsourced geocoding component was also added in order to map various restaurant locations across New York City. Throughout the course of the project, 1,335,570 dishes were transcribed from 17,562 menus. Users have consistently requested API keys throughout the life of the project to explore the data and build their own projects.
The full text of the original "About" page for "What's on the Menu" is available here.
Initial Publication Date
2011
Original URL
About NYPL's Menu Collection
The New York Public Library’s menu collection, housed in the Rare Book Division, originated through the energetic efforts of Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), who, in 1900, began to collect menus on the Library's behalf. Miss Buttolph added more than 25,000 menus to the collection, before leaving the Library in 1924. The collection has continued to grow through additional gifts of graphic, gastronomic, topical, or sociological interest, especially but not exclusively New York-related. The collection now contains approximately 45,000 items, about quarter of which have so far been digitized and made available in the Digital Collections.
The Rare Books Division of The New York Public Library houses approximately 200,000 titles, covering five centuries of printing—from the 1450s to the present—and representing Continental Europe, England, and the Americas.
