The New York Public Library has been collecting restaurantmenus for more than a century, and have embarked on a project to get the menu information out of the Rare Books Division and online for public consumption (pun intended). They have over 45,000 unique menus, and have digitized nearly a quarter of them.

Tremont House Menu 1859

To accomplish this staggering task, the NYPL has created a program to enlist the help of the layman by having volunteers work online to input the menu information, including culinary and economic content that will be categorized and easily accessible to anyone interested in foods of years’ past: historians, chefs, nutritional scientists, authors, educators…the list is endless!

They have made the process uber-easy, and I can testify to their quick response times. You can find out more by visiting their website: http://menus.nypl.org and http://menus.nypl.org/about.