Rick the Rat rides the subway to NYC Restaurant Week restaurants

NYC Restaurant Week started - but I didn't like their website. So I built Rick, a rat who knows every kitchen in NYC. You ask him what you're after, he searches, and he physically travels to your pick — walking, Citibike, cab, or the actual subway.

The subway part was the fun bit. `subway.json` is real MTA line geometry plus station data. When a trip is over ~2.2km, it finds the nearest station to each end, plans a direct or one-transfer ride, and slices the true track geometry between the boarding and exit stations — so Rick rides the real line, not a line drawn between two dots. The car sprite is repainted per route color and the active line highlights underneath him as he goes.

Everything else is deliberately small. 636 restaurants in a 509KB JSON bundled into the serverless function at build time — no database. Map is MapLibre with OpenFreeMap tiles. Rick is hand-drawn pixel art rendered as SVG rects. Walking and driving legs come from OSRM, with a straight-line fallback when it times out.

The same data is also a free MCP server if you'd rather just ask Claude — no auth, no API key:

claude mcp add --transport http nyc-restaurant-week https://nyc-restaurant-week-mcp.vercel.app/mcp

Four tools: search, detail, date-check, and filter facets.

Haha yes that'd be fun

I scraped all the restaurants in restaurant week. So no filtering there. But you can filter via the search for whatever criteria you're interested in