What’s for Dinner?

This week the Washington Post published an article about restaurants across the US, which uses a dataset (and interactive map) gleaned from marketing data. The dataset contains the location and type of over 700,000 restaurants. There are lots of ways to slice this data, but I’ll start with cuisine popularity by state.

Here is the relative popularity of Mexican restaurants. This charts in this post display the percentage of restaurants in a state that are of the specified cuisine.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, given its name, that New Mexico has the highest concentration of Mexican restaurants. What is surprising is how much it dominates – about 50% more (as a percentage of all restaurants) than the next highest (Texas).

Let’s look at other cuisine types. Italian (not including pizza):

Highly concentrated in the Northeast. Interestingly, Florida shows up higher than nearby states; I suspect that reflects the retirees from up north bringing their tastes with them.

Alright then, pizza:

Heavy in the Northeast and North. Funny, New York is known for pizza, but it isn’t as concentrated as nearby states. That’s because New York city has so many restaurants with so many cuisines, it kind of spreads things out. Also, note that even the lessor pizza states aren’t that pale. Everyone has pizza.

Asian food is a problem. Hawaii so dominates the list, that everyone else pales by comparison:

So lets redo that chart, changing the scale so that the #2 state is now the top of the scale. This will exaggerate the distinctions between states. (By the way, the #2 state for Asian food is…Alaska!).

Unsurprisingly, heavily concentrated on the West Coast. With a slight echo on the East Coast.

What about pubs?

Wisconsin, the pub capital of the US? Apparently. According to this article, there’s an historical reason for this. In the late 1800s Wisconsin was home to lots of breweries. The breweries tended to own their own taverns, by the hundreds. There’s a culture of taverns (now, “brew pubs”) that’s been part of Wisconsin for over 100 years.

Here’s barbecue:

Note that this typically includes ‘soul food’ or ‘southern’ cuisines, so no surprises in those results.

Next, seafood:

You like seafood? Then head to Maine or Louisiana. Or maybe the rest of the gulf coast, or Alaska or Hawaii. But not South Dakota.

Finally, fast food:

Next time I’ll drill down for a closer look, at the county-level or even more granular.