Searching for Restaurants

Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) supports searching for restaurants in several US cities, including Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Restaurants are stored as items in the database, with images and attributes. Since they are not available for purchase, restaurants have no offers or variations. However, they can have customer reviews. Attributes for restaurants include both their city (address) and their neighborhood, to facilitate easy grouping and browsing.

For restaurants, the image files are not photos of the restaurant itself, but a scanned page from the menu. Since menu pages are frequently updated, these images may not be current. Currently, only one page of the menu is available through ECS for each restaurant.

Restaurants include a price rating, with values as described in the table below.

RatingPrice per person (based on entree, appetizer or salad, one non-alcoholic drink plus tax and tip)
1Under $15 per person
2$15-$30
3$30-$45
4Over $45

Restaurants are categorized within browse nodes by city and by cuisine. The city browse nodes and some of the cuisine browse nodes are listed below.

City/CuisineBrowse Node
Seattle917978
Boston917982
San Francisco917980
New York917976
Washington, D.C.917986
Chicago917984
American cuisine1002940
Asian cuisine1002944
Seafood1003012
Greek1002976
Indian1002978
Italian1002982
Japanese1002984
Chinese1002954

When looking up restaurants, the useful response groups are:

Looking up Specific Restaurant(s)

You may use the ItemLookup operation to find specific restaurants using their ASIN. Restaurants do not have SKUs or UPCs.

For example, you might use the following REST request to look up a restaurant:

US 
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
    &AWSAccessKeyId=[ID]
    &Operation=ItemLookup
    &ItemId=[RestaurantASIN]
    &ResponseGroup=Request,ItemAttributes,Images

You can can specify up to ten ASINs in a single request by inserting a comma-delimited list of ASINs in the ItemId parameter (REST) or by inserting multiple ItemId elements (SOAP).

If you wish to see reviews and browse nodes as well, you would use a REST request that looked like this:

US 
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
    &AWSAccessKeyId=[ID]
    &Operation=ItemLookup
    &ItemId=[RestaurantASIN]
    &ResponseGroup=Request,ItemAttributes,Images,Reviews,BrowseNodes

If there are more than five reviews for the restaurant, you can use the ReviewPage parameter to retrieve up to 100 reviews. Ratings are based on the same 5-star rating system as other items in the Amazon database where 1 is poor and 5 is the best.

Searching for Restaurants

You can search for restaurants by various criteria using ItemSearch. If you set the SearchIndex parameter to Restaurants, you can then use any of the parameters listed below to specify the criteria for your search.

ItemSearch parameters permitted when SearchIndex is set to Restaurants

ItemSearch parameterDescription
KeywordsSearch by words or phrases
TitleName of restaurant
BrowseNodeCity or cuisine browse node ID
CityCity name, e.g., Seattle
CuisineCuisine type, e.g., Greek
NeighborhoodCity neighborhood, varies by city. For example, for Chicago the neighborhoods include Gold Coast and River North.
ItemPageAllows you to display multiple pages of restaurant results, since only ten search results are returned at a time, and there may be many pages of results.
SortSorted order for returned results

For example, if you wished to find waterfront seafood restaurants in Boston, you might use the REST request:

US 
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
    &AWSAccessKeyId=[ID]
    &Operation=ItemSearch
    &SearchIndex=Restaurants
    &Keywords=seafood
    &City=Boston
    &Neighborhood=Waterfront
    &ResponseGroup=Request,ItemAttributes,Images,Reviews

If you wish, you can sort the results alphabetically (by restaurant name) if you set the Sort parameter to titlerank as shown in the REST request below.

US 
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
    &AWSAccessKeyId=[ID]
    &Operation=ItemSearch
    &SearchIndex=Restaurants
    &Keywords=seafood
    &City=Boston
    &Neighborhood=Waterfront
    &ResponseGroup=Request,ItemAttributes,Images,Reviews
    &Sort=titlerank