“What’s on the Menu is a tremendous educational resource that breathes life into our city’s most beloved restaurants and dishes. It has been an indispensable and hugely inspirational tool in the ongoing development of my restaurant.”
—Rich Torrisi, Chef
Audience
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What’s on the Menu? offers its menus to anyone interested in taking a virtual trip into the cultural history of the restaurant industry. Researchers can look into the culinary options of the past as a data source. Chefs can gain inspiration from the past to recreate old classics or invent new, historically inspired dishes. Economists can use the menus to compare the economic trends from past to present. Novelists can use the menus from a particular time to better capture the culture of that period. The versatility of this historical culture appeals to anyone from scientists to museum-goers with its wide-ranging availability of menus from across time and the world.
Peers
Building Inspector is another New York Public Library hosted project. This project uses map data of New York City from the NYPL to create a comprehensive directory of old New York. The project focuses on the development of a computer application to create a historically accurate map of New York City throughout its existence.
Building Inspector works to reconstruct a digital historical map containing New York City’s lost locations to study the city and its urban changes in new ways. This project opens up opportunities for researchers and other digital humanities projects, including What’s on the Menu?, to collect location data as well as provide a similar historical snapshot of cultural change.
Curating Menus
Curating Menus is a project that uses the What’s on the Menu? database as a resource in scholarly research. This project is primarily focused on studying and researching food and culture throughout history. As the name implies, it is a project based on exploring and studying the curation of menus. Differing from What’s on the Menu?, Curating Menus takes on a less visually interactive layout, instead consisting of a largely text-focused presentation of detailed curation, research, history, culinary data, location, and similar kinds of information.
