A new report reveals that D.C. has some of the most diverse restaurant menus in America.
Datassential, a company that provides data to the food and beverage industry, said the District is ranked No. 4 for what it calls “food forwardness.”
“It’s not just about having a lot of trendy restaurants. It’s about having a thriving and diverse restaurant scene,” the company said.
Jack Li, executive chairman of Datassential, said the company collected data from 158 metro areas, and focused on three key points: how many different types of cuisine it takes to make up 90% of an area’s total restaurants, the global diversity of restaurants and how knowledgeable people in the metro are when it comes to different types of foods.
“In terms of opening up your food palate and being able to experience different things and having exposure to new foods, flavors and the sort of mashups and twists that emerge from all those combinations, D.C. is a wonderful place to be,” Li said.
The D.C. area falls behind San Francisco (No. 1), Los Angeles (No. 2) and Miami (No. 3) in the ranking.
A closer look at the data, according to Li, shows African restaurants are 5-and-a-half times more prevalent in the D.C. area than they are in the rest of the U.S. He said, for comparison, this area has 80 Ethiopian restaurants, while Omaha, Nebraska, only has two.
“It’s a big difference,” Li said. “That means a lot more people (in the D.C. region) are going to get a chance to experience this.”
Korean restaurants are 2.4 times more common in the D.C. region than in other U.S. cities. The area also ranks high for the number of South American, Mediterranean and Indian restaurants that call it home.
Overall, the list of cuisine types that add up to 90% of restaurants in the D.C. area is 28. For Wausau, Wisconsin, which was at the bottom of the ranking, only 11 cuisine types got that area to 90%.
Li said the makeup of a region did play a role in the results.
“I think there’s a pretty straight, you know, solid line that you could draw from the people that live in an area to the types of restaurants that open up in the area,” he said.
Li said the data also shows how exposure to different cuisines can also lead to more and more of those types of restaurants popping up.
“I think there’s certainly a learning there that food gets better when we embrace … more cultures and the foods of more cultures,” Li said.
Baltimore came up as No. 34 on the list.
