Back in 2008 New York Magazine made a big splash when it purchased MenuPages for an undisclosed sum, scooping up the site's local food blogs with it. Three years later those blogs are gone (or merged into Grub Street) and New York has decided it can do without the hassle of maintaining up-to-date listings of what local restaurants have on their menu. So they've gone and sold the site to Seamless, the delivery site that used to be called SeamlessWeb (and which last we checked was owned by ARAMARK). But what does that really mean?
As far as we can tell, all it means, at least in the short term, is that Seamless—which is in a war of sorts with rival Delivery.com over restaurant listings—will now have easier access to more restaurants to try and get into their system. Meanwhile MenuPages menus for Seamless-affiliated restaurants will, we have a strong hunch, be more accurate. And as long as we can continue to search MenuPages for specific dishes, we are cool with that. From what we understand, the process MenuPages uses to actually go and get all those menus is both time consuming and costly.
Meanwhile, for the industry folk out there, the big thing to note is that not only will Grub Street's content partnership with MenuPages remain in place, New York Media will continue to represent MenuPages when it comes to advertising sales. Which makes sense, since ad sales isn't exactly something the folks at Seamless have much expertise with.
