New York City has one of the most varied restaurant scenes in the world, but cuisine patterns still show up clearly when you look at the city by zip code. In this post, I analyzed NYC restaurant inspection records to see which cuisines appear most often across the city, and where different cuisines are more concentrated.
The map below lets you explore the data two ways: by the most common cuisine in each zip code, or by the number of restaurants for any individual cuisine.
TL;DR
- American is the most common cuisine in many NYC zip codes.
- Italian/Pizza becomes especially prominent when you look beyond American restaurants.
- The map is interactive: choose a cuisine from the dropdown to see where that cuisine has the most restaurants by zip code.
- This analysis uses NYC restaurant inspection data and includes over 30,000 restaurants after cleanup.
NYC cuisine patterns by zip code
The most popular cuisine in many zip codes is American. Probably unsurprising to most New Yorkers, if you excluded American restaurants, the most popular cuisine becomes Italian/Pizza for many zip codes. Walk through Manhattan, and you will see a pizza place on nearly every block.
Explore the cuisine map
Use the dropdown to switch between two views. Most popular cuisine colors each zip code by the cuisine with the highest restaurant count. Selecting a specific cuisine shows how many restaurants of that type are in each zip code. Hover or tap a zip code to see the exact count.
Takeaways
- American restaurants are everywhere, which makes them the default leader in many zip codes.
- Italian/Pizza has a broad footprint, especially in Manhattan and other dense restaurant areas.
- Cuisine concentration is local. A cuisine can be common citywide but still cluster strongly in a smaller set of neighborhoods or corridors.
- The per-cuisine view is often more useful than the default view if you are looking for a specific kind of food, because it shows where that cuisine has depth rather than only where it is the single most common category.
For more NYC restaurant maps, you can also explore my analyses of pizza places in Manhattan, pizza places in Brooklyn, and the best Manhattan neighborhoods for pizza.
Want a downloadable infographic?
The interactive map is best for exploring individual cuisines, but I also made a static infographic version of the data if you want something easier to save, share, or reference later.
Download high-res infographic
How this data was collected
- Source: NYC Restaurant Inspection Results from data.cityofnewyork.us.
- Scope: Over 30,000 NYC restaurants after cleanup.
- Time period: The source data goes back to 2015; this post focuses on cuisine counts by zip code.
- Restaurant identity: Duplicate restaurant entries were removed using each restaurant’s CAMIS identifier.
- Geography: Restaurants were grouped by zip code, with very small single-building or single-block zip codes dropped from the final map.
- Cuisine cleanup: Very broad, miscellaneous, or less-useful categories were removed, including Coffee/Tea, Other, Sandwiches, Bottled Beverages, Frozen Desserts, Donuts, Hamburgers, Hotdogs, and similar categories.
- Cuisine grouping: Some related cuisines were combined, such as Italian and Pizza into Italian/Pizza, and Russian into Eastern European.
- Tools: Python for data cleanup and analysis, plus Leaflet for the interactive map on this page.
Sources
NYC Restaurant Inspection results: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/DOHMH-New-York-City-Restaurant-Inspection-Results/43nn-pn8j/about_data
Jupyter Notebook: 250805-nyc-restaurant-popular-cuisines.ipynb
Track your own NYC restaurant favorites
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