New York City is a melting pot of cultures, and its culinary scene reflects this diversity. With thousands of restaurants offering cuisines from around the world, it can be overwhelming to decide where to eat. In this post, I analyzed data from NYC’s restaurant inspection records to visualize the most popular cuisines by zip code.
Notes:
- Data process methods and links to the data source and Jupyter notebook are at the bottom of this post.
- The interactive figures are best viewed on larger screens or with mobile devices in landscape mode.
Most popular cuisines by zip code in 2024
The most popular cuisine in most zip codes is American (see the image below). Probably unsurprising to most New Yorkers, if you excluded American restaurants, the most popular cuisine becomes Italian/Pizza for most zip codes. Walk through Manhattan, and you’ll see a pizza place on nearly every block.
Download high-res image
The image below is an interactive version of the map. Hover over a zip code to see the top cuisine type and the number of restaurants offering that cuisine.
Per-cuisine frequency per zip code
The interactive figure allows you to see the frequency of each cuisine type per zip code. Select the drop down menu at the top left of the figure to select a cuisine type.
Methods and data overview
The dataset contains information on over ~30,000 restaurants in NYC, which is from the publicly available NYC restaurant inspection results on data.cityofnewyork.us. The data goes back to 2015. Some data cleanup was required, including:
(1) Removing the following cuisines:
- Coffee/Tea
- Other
- Sandwiches/Salads/Mixed Buffet
- Bottled Beverages
- Soups/Salads/Sandwiches
- Not Listed/Not Applicable
- Fruits/Vegetables
- Soups
- Nuts/Confectionary
- Bakery Products/Desserts
- Juice, Smoothies, Fruit Salads
- Sandwiches
- Frozen Desserts
- Chicken
- Seafood
- Donuts
- Hamburgers
- Haute Cuisine
- Salads
- Hotdogs
- Hotdogs/Pretzels
(2) Dropped some zip codes that represented a single building or city block.
(3) Grouped some cuisines together, such as:
- “Italian” and “Pizza” were grouped as “Italian/Pizza”.
- “Russian” was grouped with “Eastern European”.
(4) Drop duplicate restaurant entries. Restaurants are unique identified by their “CAMIS” number. Some restaurants had many entries even in the same year for different inspection dates.
Sources
The figure was made using Python’s Plotly library and Figma.
Data Source:
NYC Restaurant Inspection results: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/DOHMH-New-York-City-Restaurant-Inspection-Results/43nn-pn8j/about_data
Jupyter Notebook: