REST APIs are designed to handle requests and responses, making them a great choice for retrieving large amounts of data. You can easily send a request to your API and receive a response containing the menu data, which can be easily parsed and displayed in your app.

On the other hand, Socket.IO is designed for real-time communication between the server and the client. While it can be used to retrieve data, it's not optimized for this use case and may introduce unnecessary complexity to your application.

Here's an example of how you can retrieve restaurant menu data using a REST API with Axios in Node.js:

const axios = require('axios');

axios.get('https://your-api-url.com/menu')
  .then(response => {
    const menuData = response.data;
    // Do something with the menu data, such as display it in your app
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.log(error);
  });

In this example, we're using Axios to make a GET request to the /menu endpoint of our API, which returns the restaurant menu data. We then retrieve the data from the response and do something with it, such as display it in our app.

When it comes to handling large amounts of data, you may want to consider using pagination or other techniques to limit the amount of data returned in each request. This can help improve performance and reduce server load.

In summary, when retrieving restaurant menu data from a Node.js API, REST APIs with Axios are the better choice over Socket. IO. REST APIs are optimized for handling requests and responses, making them ideal for retrieving large amounts of data.