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Ever wondered what major city has the most restaurants? How about what city has the most restaurants per capita.

We wanted to take a look at restaurant saturation around high population US and European cities. By pulling population data from Wikipedia and total number of restaurants in a given city from Yelp to compare where available, we found the number of people per restaurant in each location. You can see the results below:

City Population Number of Restaurants Number of People Per Restaurant
Washington D.C. 693,000 6705 103.4
Paris 2,240,000 16911 132.5
San Francisco 884,000 4397 201.0
Seattle 724,000 3309 218.8
Denver 704,000 2903 242.5
San Jose 1,040,000 2933 354.6
Philadelphia 1,580,000 4283 368.9
San Diego 1,420,000 3474 408.8
Austin 950,000 2307 411.8
Madrid 3,180,000 7719 412.0
Chicago 2,720,000 5953 456.9
New York 8,620,000 18754 459.6
Columbus 879,000 1904 461.7
Berlin 3,710,000 7615 487.2
Los Angeles 4,000,000 8144 491.2
Dallas 1,340,000 2701 496.1
Rome 2,880,000 5367 536.6
Charlotte 859,000 1447 593.6
Indianapolis 863,000 1321 653.3
San Antonio 1,510,000 2275 663.7
Fort Worth 874,000 1307 668.7
London 8,830,000 13073 675.4
Jacksonville 892,000 1218 732.3
Phoenix 1,630,000 1889 862.9
Houston 2,310,000 2666 866.5
Istanbul 15,030,000 3395 4427.1

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A few things of note:

  • Yelp data of total restaurant count as of September 2018. Some restaurants may have opened or closed in recent weeks.
  • While tourism certainly increases overall restaurant density, cities like Berlin, Los Angeles, and London being in the middle-bottom of the list was interesting.
  • Many of these cities that have high restaurant density are also serving a greater metro area population that might not directly live in the city (Washington D.C. being a prime example).

Population data sourced from Wikipedia – last counted in 2017.

Restaurant count sourced from Yelp.