UMich Dining

umich-dining-mcp

An MCP server for the dining halls of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It answers what is being served, which dishes are vegan or halal, what a dish contains, how many calories it has, and when each hall is open.

Every answer is read live from dining.umich.edu. Pages are kept in memory for a few minutes so that ten questions cost one visit, but nothing is written to disk and no menu is mirrored.

Hosted MCP (no installation required)

The public Streamable HTTP endpoint is:

https://umich-dining-mcp.duckdns.org/mcp

Connect a compatible MCP client directly to this URL. No npm installation or GitHub download is needed.

The existing npm package remains available for users who prefer running the MCP server locally through stdio.

Install

npm install -g umich-dining-mcp

or run it without installing anything:

npx -y umich-dining-mcp

Claude Code

claude mcp add umich-dining -- npx -y umich-dining-mcp

Cursor

~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "umich-dining": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "umich-dining-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

VS Code

.vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "umich-dining": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "umich-dining-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Any other client that starts MCP servers over stdio takes the same mcpServers entry as Cursor, with npx -y umich-dining-mcp as the command.

Tools

Resources

Example questions

What is serving at Bursley for dinner tonight?

Which halls are open right now?

Find vegan dishes at South Quad that do not contain soy.

What are the ingredients of the Oatmeal at Bursley? How many calories?

When is Markley open on Saturday?

Show me dishes with more than 500 mg of sodium.

Which halls serve tiramisu between the 24th and the 26th?

The response contract

The rows of search_dishes and filter_dishes carry small integers instead of names, and a key block at the top of the response maps every code back to its slug. The key lists only what that response uses. The codes are frozen for the life of the contract.

{
  "key": { "halls": { "1": "bursley" }, "meals": { "3": "Lunch" },
           "stations": { "7": "Grill" }, "traits": { "5": "vegan" },
           "allergens": { "7": "milk" } },
  "units": { "calories": "kcal", "protein": "g" },
  "note": "Allergen codes: check key.allergens before reporting; site data is advisory.",
  "date": "2026-10-21",
  "matches": [
    [1, 3, 7, "Grilled Chicken", [5], [7], 3, 320, "1 Each (113g)", 113, 32]
  ]
}

A row is an array; its fixed positions are named in each tool description and the variable nutrient tail is carried once per response as nutrients. The member names of a named row are two and a half times the data of the row, repeated on every row: a named row cost 216 bytes, an array row costs 72.

• The halls are 1..10 in the order of the registry below, the meals are 1 (Breakfast), 2 (Brunch), 3 (Lunch) and 4 (Dinner), the allergens are 1..15 and the six boolean traits are 1..6 (glutenfree, halal, kosher, spicy, vegan, vegetarian). A meal label the site invents takes the next free code, from 5. The stations have a frozen vocabulary too: the same station carries the same code in every response, so a code can be remembered.
• mhealthyTier is 1 (Nutrient Dense Low) to 5 (Nutrient Dense High). The scale is fixed and described in the tool descriptions and in umich://taxonomy.
• A row carries the carbon tier (carbonFootprint) only when the call constrains it with max_carbon or sorts by carbonFootprint; otherwise it is left out to keep the row small.
• The traits array carries the six boolean traits only; the density tier is lifted into its own numeric field.
• The units map gives the unit of every nutrient the response returns. A micronutrient is an amount like every other nutrient: the site publishes the percent of the Daily Value, and the row carries the amount that percent stands for — 15 %DV of an 18 mg Daily Value of iron is 2.7 in mg. The percent is still available under its own name, %DV, in a threshold.
• A search or a filter takes the halls it covers: one hall, several halls, or no hall at all for every one of them. The rows come back in the order that was asked for, and limit takes the first of them: the default is 50 rows, and the answer says how many matched and how to see the rest.
• The row always carries the calories and the serving size. Every other nutrient, the sodium included, is asked for by name with include_nutrients — the sodium has nothing that makes it more interesting than the protein. A nutrient a filter constrained is always returned, whether or not it was asked for.
• A single-day response carries date; a range response carries dateRange and each row carries the dates it appeared on.
• A dish without a published value is reported as null, never as zero. A trace or a < value is not a value at all.

get_menu and the sweep tools return the same compact row, so a row means the same thing wherever it is read. get_item_nutrition is the tool that returns the raw nutrition panel, of one dish.

A whole menu is far smaller this way: the menu of South Quad went from 60,266 bytes to 8,817, and the menu of Bursley from 42,141 to 6,573. The panel of a single dish is one call to get_item_nutrition.

The halls

The id is what get_menu, get_hours and search_dishes expect. The code of a hall is its position in this list, counted from one.

Dates

The site publishes menus from three days ago to fourteen days ahead. Outside that range the site does not answer with an error, it answers with a different day's menu, so a date outside the range is refused before anything is fetched, with a message that names the range the site offers. When the page states which day it rendered, that day is compared with the one you asked for and a mismatch is an error rather than a wrong answer.

A range is asked for with from and to; to omitted means the last published day. The two cannot be combined with date. A range that does not fit in one call is read in windows with offset; the coverage block of the answer names the offset of the next window.

Time

Every time the server reports is campus time: the time zone of Ann Arbor, America/Detroit, which is Eastern Standard Time and Eastern Daylight Time in the summer. The day the site publishes, the mealtimes, and the "today" of a cache entry are all read in that zone.

The zone of the machine the server runs on does not matter. A server in Chicago and a server in UTC answer the same question the same way, and the test suite checks that by running the meal selection under several host zones. Set UMICH_DINING_TIMEZONE only to point the server at a mirror of the site in another zone.

Filters

A constraint on a nutrient excludes the dishes that publish no value for it: an unknown value is never a zero.

The cost of a range

A range query reads one page per hall per day, and the site is fetched at most two pages a second. A query that needs more upstream pages than UMICH_DINING_MAX_RANGE_FETCHES (default 12) returns the rows it could serve and a coverage block that says how much was served:

"coverage": { "requested": 30, "cached": 18, "fetchedNow": 12, "pending": 0, "failed": 0,
              "stale": 0, "offset": 0, "pages": 30, "nextOffset": null }

The numbers add up: every page the query asked for was cached, fetched, left pending or failed. nextOffset is where the rest of the range begins, so a wide range is read in windows: ask again with offset set to that number.

The persistent cache exists for this: the pages of the published window are kept on disk and warmed in the background, so a range query is usually served without touching the site.

Allergens

Allergen data is only as good as the site. The menu page flags the allergens the kitchen reported for a dish, but it does not distinguish "contains" from "may contain", there are no ingredient lists, and a missing flag is not an absence of the allergen. The site's own guidance is: "Look for the signs posted near each food serving area for a list of menu options with allergens highlighted in red." "Gluten Free" means the dish is made without gluten, not that it is safe for someone with coeliac disease. Dedicated gluten-free pantries exist at South Quad, East Quad, Mosher-Jordan and Bursley.

The caveat is in the description of every tool that returns allergen data and in umich://taxonomy. A response that carries allergens repeats one line reminding the reader to resolve the codes; the long caveat is not repeated in every body. No tool ever claims that a dish is safe.

Two further points about the traits, because the site is careful about them: a vegan dish is reported as vegetarian as well, since the site keeps the two apart, and no other trait implies another (halal does not imply vegetarian, and neither does kosher).

Configuration

How it treats the site

dining.umich.edu is somebody else's website, so the server stays gentle with it:

• Two requests in flight, 500 ms apart at most. The limit is global to the process.
• A cache with in-flight de-duplication. Ten questions about the same hall cost one request. Today's menu is cached for 15 minutes, a future menu for 6 hours, a past menu for 24 hours and the weekly hours for 24 hours.
• Stale on error. If the site cannot be reached and a cached copy exists, the copy is served and marked as stale instead of failing the question.
• One User-Agent. The site answers HTTP 200 to a small set of clients only; python-requests/2.32.3 is the one that has been measured to work, while a generic fetch agent and a headless browser both get 403. It is not the server's real identity, which is why it is configurable.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. The test suite, the fixtures and the release process are described in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.

Maintainer hosting and updates

The Oracle deployment is separate from the npm package. Its NGINX configuration, systemd service and updater are maintainer infrastructure, not requirements for MCP users.

See Oracle hosting and automatic updates.

The optional Oracle updater checks published GitHub tags against npm releases, builds and tests new versions, and rolls back if the updated service fails its health check. Ordinary GitHub commits do not trigger deployments.