Restaurants, also called eateries, are business premises where foods, drinks, or refreshments are served to customers. As humans, we’re hardwired to look for something to eat when the hunger pangs come calling. In such cases, especially when you’re not at home, a restaurant can be your best resort.
However, finding a good restaurant is not always easy. Fortunately, some of the restaurant services have exposed their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow developers to fetch their features and integrate them into their applications. This way, customers can easily find nearby restaurants that suit their tastes and preferences.
As such, to help you in getting the right API for your use case, we analyzed several restaurant APIs available on the Rakuten RapidAPI platform, which is the largest API marketplace in the world, based on the following three factors:
- API features: We reviewed the outstanding features of each of the restaurant APIs.
- Price: We looked at the cost of embedding each of the APIs into end-user applications.
- Ease of use: We scrutinized the ease of fetching the APIs’ features and integrating them into applications.
Eventually, we came up with the following list of the Top 7 Best Restaurant APIs:
- TripAdvisor API
- US Restaurant Menus API
- Worldwide Restaurants API
- Gurunavi Restaurant Search API
- Nutritionix – Nutrition Database API
- Edamam Food and Grocery Database API
- Ticketresto-nc API
Top 7 Best Restaurant APIs
TL;DR: Here’s a table summarizing our main findings.
| API | API Features | Pricing | Ease of Use |
| TripAdvisor API | Get restaurants information, reviews, pricing, location coordinates, and more | Free and varying paid plans from $20 to $300 per month | Easy |
| US Restaurant Menus API | Get U.S. restaurants information, address, location details, contact details, search for menu items | Free and varying paid plans from $25 to $100 per month | Easy |
| Worldwide Restaurants API | Get data about restaurants globally, including photos, reviews, and contact details, and search for restaurants | Free, monthly paid plan of $5, or pay-per-use plan of $0.01 per use | Easy |
| Gurunavi Restaurant Search API | Search restaurants in Japan, get a restaurant’s location, contact details, reviews, and more | Free for 1,000 requests per day, then $0.01 for each | Easy |
| Nutritionix – Nutrition Database API | Get nutrition data for restaurants, food manufacturers, and other food items from around the world | Free | Easy |
| Edamam Food and Grocery Database API | Get nutrition and diet data for restaurant items | Free | Easy |
| Ticketresto-nc API | Get restaurant tickets easily | Free | Easy |
1. TripAdvisor API
TripAdvisor is a popular travel and restaurant website that provides a wide range of travel-related content, including reviews of restaurants and hotels, price comparisons, and traveler photos.
API features: The TripAdvisor API offers you a programmatic access to the website’s features, allowing you to integrate them into your application easily. With the API, you can fetch real-time restaurants information, which enables your users to make the best choice on the one to go for. You can use the API to get restaurants lists according to the specified coordinates and radii as well as get all information about a specific restaurant according to its location ID. Furthermore, the API allows you to query data about flights prices, attractive locations, hotels booking, and more.
Price: As long as you make less than 500 requests per month, you can use the API for free. Beyond the free plan, you can subscribe to any of its paid plans, which starts from $20 per month to $300 per month.
Ease of use: There is expansive documentation to ensure you get up and running with the API easily.
2. US Restaurant Menus API
The US Restaurant Menus API provides access to an extensive database of more than 350,000 restaurant menus and more than 3,400,000 individual menu items across the United States.
API features: With the US Restaurant Menus API, you can get information about restaurants through searching by geo coordinates, fields, IDs, zip codes, state, and other parameters. It returns the restaurant’s address, location details, contact details, prices information, and more. The API also allows you to search for menu items offered by various restaurants across the U.S.
Price: The free tier is restricted to 500 requests per month. Otherwise, you can subscribe to any of its paid plans, which ranges from $25 per month to $100 per month.
Ease of use: There is detailed documentation with code samples in various programming languages to minimize any hurdles during integration.
3. Worldwide Restaurants API
The Worldwide Restaurants API offers an expansive database of restaurants all over the world.
API features: With the Worldwide Restaurants API, you can get restaurants photos, reviews, location details, open hours, contact details, and more. It also allows you to search for restaurants and get their information.
Price: The free plan is limited to 15 requests per day. Otherwise, you can pay $5 per month and get 1,000 requests per day. You can also opt for its pay-per-use plan, which is priced at $0.01 per use.
Ease of use: With just a few lines of code, you can start incorporating the API into your application. There are also reference materials to assist you in overcoming any challenges.
4. Gurunavi Restaurant Search API
Gurunavi is a popular restaurant portal in Japan that allows users to search for their favorite dining places from a database of more than 600,000 listings.
API features: With the Gurunavi Restaurant Search API, you can search restaurants by area, keyword, price, or type of cuisine. You can use the API to get information about a restaurant’s location, contact details, opening hours, reviews, payment methods accepted, images, and more. Furthermore, the API supports different language options, including English, Korean, and Chinese. Therefore, it’s the API you need to assist your users in finding the best restaurant in Japan that suits their likings.
Price: As long as you make less than 1,000 requests per day, you can use the API for free. Beyond the free quota, you’ll pay $0.01 for each additional request.
Ease of use: There is detailed documentation to ensure you make the most of the API in integrating restaurant search functionalities into your application.
5. Nutritionix – Nutrition Database API
The Nutritionix – Nutrition Database provides helpful nutrition data for restaurants, food manufacturers, and other food items from around the world.
API features: The Nutritionix – Nutrition Database API has more than 230,000 UPCs/barcodes, 100,000 restaurant foods, and 10,000 common foods from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Therefore, you can use the API to search for a food or a brand name and get its number of calories, total fat, and other nutrition data. Furthermore, the API allows you to provide the UPC details from a food package and get a wide range of nutrition information, including the level of calories, saturated fat, fatty acids, cholesterol, protein, vitamins, and more. It’s the API you need to enable your users to understand the nutritional value of the foods they eat in restaurants.
As an aside we would like to mention our list of ten best food and recipe APIs which can be used together with Nutritionix API to create novel applications.
Price: The API is available for free.
Ease of use: There is well-explained documentation that lets you consume the API effortlessly and fast.
6. Edamam Food and Grocery Database API
The Edamam Food and Grocery Database API lets you access an extensive database of more than 750,000 basic foods, restaurant meals, and foods packaged for consumers.
API features: With the Edamam Food and Grocery Database API, you can find nutrition and diet data for restaurant items. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to extract food entities from unstructured text, enabling you to make the best decision on the food most suitable for your health status. With this technology, you can use the API to search for food by the provided UPC/barcode, name, keyword, brand, or nutrient amount, and get its nutrition facts.
Price: Developers, startups, and non-profits can use the API for free. Enterprise customers are charged according to each use case.
Ease of use: There is exhaustive documentation, endpoints descriptions, and other resources to make consuming the API flawless and quick.
7. Ticketresto-nc API
Ticketresto-nc API is a simple API that allows you to get restaurant tickets easily.
API features: With the Ticketresto-nc API, you can get a list of partner restaurants, get account details, get account balance, get all transactions, and get all account transactions since a given date. It’s the API you need to make the most of your restaurant tickets, especially in New Caledonia, France.
Price: The API is offered for free.
Ease of use: There is easy to follow documentation to ensure you get started using the API within a few minutes.
Conclusion
That’s Rakuten RapidAPI’s list of The Top 10 Best Restaurant APIs. We hope you’ll find the right API to allow your users to find the best eateries to hang out, have meetings, or enjoy a nice meal in.
If you’ve not got the API you’re searching for, you can click here and get other amazing restaurant APIs.
Happy coding!
About Rakuten RapidAPI:
Rakuten RapidAPI is the world’s largest API marketplace with 8,000+ third-party APIs and used by over 500,000 active developers. We enable developers to build transformative apps through the power of APIs. Find, test and connect to all the APIs you need in one place!
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