Explore the menus

The same 1226 dishes, read nine ways. Each door below is the whole corpus seen through one lens, and under the list is a sample of what three of them found.

From 40 menus · How we read them

Graph
Every word in the corpus and every line between them, dragged around until the clusters show.
Bands
The same vocabulary folded into rows — tap one word and every dish it touches lights up.
Matrix
Every ingredient against every way we read it cooked, as a grid, plus the pairing circle.
Constellations
The ingredients that keep turning up on the same plates, grouped, coloured and named.
Browse
Columns: pick an ingredient, then a method, then a course, down to the kitchen.
Changes
What arrived and what retired between two readings of the menus.
Wiki
The calm version of the graph — every band, every pill, no canvas.
Find a dish
Stack constraints until the answer is the plate you wanted.
Compare
Two kitchens' flavour readings on one web, over the mean of every menu we read.

Three things the menus say

Cooked two ways

One ingredient the kitchens we read disagree about, with both sides named.

Crab, broiled or fried

Our reading of the menus lists it broiled at eighteen kitchens, fried at sixteen, and both at eleven: Assateague Crab House, Blacksmith Bar & Restaurant, BLU Crabhouse & Raw Bar, Coins Pub & Restaurant, Harborside Bar & Grill, Higgins Crab House (128th St), Hooper's Crab House, Ocean 13, Sneaky Pete's, The Shark on the Harbor, Waterman's Seafood Co..

On both sides: Assateague Crab House, Blacksmith Bar & Restaurant, BLU Crabhouse & Raw Bar, Coins Pub & Restaurant, Harborside Bar & Grill, Higgins Crab House (128th St), Hooper's Crab House, Ocean 13, Sneaky Pete's, The Shark on the Harbor, Waterman's Seafood Co..

Every ingredient against every way we read it cooked →

Five neighbourhoods

Groups of ingredients that keep turning up on the same plates, found by letting a label spread along the pairings and then named by a person rather than by the detector.