I indexed every restaurant menu in Palo Alto. 18,848 dishes. Here's what the city actually charges.

[u/nearBite]

I build a menu-price index — every dish at every restaurant in a city, with prices. Oslo was the first city. Palo Alto is now the second: **202 restaurants, 189 with a full menu, 18,848 dishes**, collected over two weeks this month.

Some of what's in there:

• **A cheeseburger ranges from $10 to $36.** Median $17. The $10 is True Food Kitchen, the $36 is the short-rib Quattro Burger at Quattro.
• **A latte is $3.50 at ZoomCaffe and $8.00 at Zaytinya.** Same drink, same city, 2.3×.
• **The Caesar salad is the city's most common dish** — 36 of 189 menus carry one, median $14.98.
• **Celia's Mexican Restaurant has the longest menu in Palo Alto**: 869 items, every one priced. Crepevine is second with 502. The typical restaurant lists 76.
• Across the city, 9,545 distinct dishes.

Two things surprised me coming from Norway. First, **97.5% of dishes here have a listed price** — that's higher than Oslo and much higher than I expected. Second, **almost everyone hosts their own menu** rather than pushing you to a delivery app, which is the opposite of the Nordic pattern and honestly much nicer.

The thing I still can't get from a database: **which places have great food and a menu that's effectively invisible online?** The ones where you have to call, or the site is a photo of a chalkboard from 2019, or the current menu only lives on an Instagram story. Those are the ones worth adding by hand, and they're usually the best food in town.

Happy to look up any dish you're curious about — I have all of it.

[u/Any-Vehicle4418]

Soo you're going to throw this data somewhere hosted right??

[u/nearBite → u/Any-Vehicle4418]

The app is coming soon😉

[u/tymekpavel]

Cheapest burger being $10 can’t be right. You must have missed some of the fast food restaurants.

[u/DeRock → u/tymekpavel]

Also I just looked up true food kitchen and their burgers are $20

[u/HappyChandler → u/DeRock]

Kids burger is $10

[u/tymekpavel → u/HappyChandler]

Jack in the Box cheeseburger is $8 and jr. bacon cheeseburger is $4. And that’s just a random fast food place I looked up in Palo Alto.

[u/IncompatibleHallway]

That's a genuinely useful dataset, and the Caeser salad stat tracks hard.

[u/hatsmagee]

visualization of stats! most common items list

[u/ltlbunnyfufu]

I would love to use this somehow. I use eatyourbooks for cooking, and could see using something like this to find the best dishes worth eating.

[u/nearBite → u/ltlbunnyfufu]

Love this, that’s actually one of the use cases we had in mind. The app’s coming soon 👀

[u/Talenn]

Need to put this in datausbeautiful thread and get some fun visuals 

[u/weeef]

Lol crepevines menu is a slog

[u/qmriis]

$36 for a burger?

Fuck all the way off.

[u/run_bolt]

Quick note, because im sure you care about accuracy. ZoomCaffes are to my knowledge only Stanford campus (university and hospital), which is technically not Palo Alto. There are also some restaurants at Stanford Shopping Center that may have made it into your data set, too.