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.

Transport	stdio
Runtime	Node.js 20.18.1 or newer
Halls	the ten dining halls
Registry	io.github.esreddy2/umich-dining-mcp

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

Tool	What it does
list_locations	The ten halls with address, phone, e-mail, map link, today's service periods, whether they are open right now, and whether they have a gluten-free pantry.
get_menu	The menu of one hall: meals, stations and dishes with traits, allergens and the nutrition panel.
search_dishes	Find dishes by name, in one hall or across all of them (case-insensitive substring match).
filter_dishes	Filter the menus by allergen, trait, nutrient density, carbon footprint, calories and sodium.
get_hours	The service periods of a day plus the regular weekly schedule.
find_open_now	Which halls are serving at the current time.
get_item_nutrition	The full nutrition panel of a single dish.

Resources

Resource	Content
umich://dining-halls	The hall registry as JSON.
umich://taxonomy	The 15 allergens and 14 traits with their display labels, the trait implication closure and the allergen caveat.

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.

The halls

id	Hall	id	Hall
bursley	Bursley	south-quad	South Quad
east-quad	East Quad	twigs-at-oxford	Twigs at Oxford
markley	Markley	wolverine-village	Wolverine Village
mosher-jordan	Mosher-Jordan	lawyers-club	Lawyers Club
north-quad	North Quad	martha-cook	Martha Cook

The id is what get_menu, get_hours and search_dishes expect.

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.

Filters

Parameter	Meaning
exclude_allergens	Keeps only the dishes that do not carry any of the listed allergens.
require_traits	Keeps only the dishes that carry every listed trait.
min_mhealthy	Minimum nutrient-density tier, 1..5 (3 = "Nutrient Dense Medium or better").
max_carbon	Maximum carbon footprint: low, medium or high.
max_calories, max_sodium_mg	Numeric caps. Dishes without a published value are excluded.

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 same caveat is repeated in the description of every tool that returns allergen data and in every response that contains it. 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

Environment variable	Default	Meaning
UMICH_DINING_USER_AGENT	python-requests/2.32.3	The User-Agent to use.
UMICH_DINING_BASE_URL	https://dining.umich.edu	The site to read.
UMICH_DINING_TIMEOUT_MS	20000	Per-request timeout.
UMICH_DINING_MAX_RETRIES	3	Retries after the first attempt.
UMICH_DINING_MAX_CONCURRENCY	2	Requests in flight.
UMICH_DINING_MIN_GAP_MS	500	Minimum gap between requests.
UMICH_DINING_TTL_TODAY_MS	900000	Cache lifetime of today's menu.
UMICH_DINING_TTL_FUTURE_MS	21600000	Cache lifetime of a future menu.
UMICH_DINING_TTL_PAST_MS	86400000	Cache lifetime of a past menu.
UMICH_DINING_TTL_REGULAR_HOURS_MS	86400000	Cache lifetime of the weekly schedule.

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.