Restaurant preferences of the 50 largest U.S. cities
 

http://www.estately.com/america-food-map

Kind of an interesting survey.

Neat!

I don't know about this... Boston best for donuts? I do hope they are not talking about dry Dunkin' Donuts! :)

All that and they didn't bother to include BBQ

This looks to be a quantity survey. Given the ubiquity of Dunkin' Donuts outlets (including the airports), the Boston metropolitan area was a shoe-in.

Damn straight, LB #2 for donuts. But, the famous donut shop was replaced by a Dunkins :(. And SD makes sense for being terrible for burgers, you go there for Cali burritos.

Any ranking for "best pizza" that doesn't include New York in the top five is just wrong.

Wow - did you notice how many times El Paso features in the worst section?

This.

After noticing this I completely dismissed the entire article as useless garbage.

I actually expected SD to be in the top five for Mexican but apparently that's not the case.

It's mostly just rubbish fast food-type places with nasty carne asada fries - which isn't exactly Mexican - and even worse flautas...or fish taco food trucks that are no great shakes. But Aquí es Texcoco (in Chula Vista), good times.

Anyway, I went to Tijuana every weekend during my brief SD stint to satisfy the Mexican craving.

It's purely based on quantity not quality and thus more a comment on the gastronomic markets and the geography of these cities than the quality of the food offerings.

What you can take from the numbers is that Washington D.C. has a *lot* of food places per capita - which isn't surprising given it's a city of work and play - rather than a city of residence - for large quantities of young, unsettled people with good incomes and active social lives. Meanwhile Philadelphia doesn't have a lot of them per capita which perhaps indicates that Philadelphia doesn't have as many people of above type as cities like D.C. and very importantly that it encompasses large swaths of primarily residential space inside its city limits.

If you look at the statistics, the city of Philadelphia encompasses around 25% of the population of its metropolitan area. In comparison, the city of Washington only encompasses about 11% of its metropolitan area and the city of Detroit, which ranked very highly in the burgers and pizzas categories, encompasses only about 16-18% of its metropolitan area. In other words, Washington and Detroit host - in relative terms - more eateries for people who don't actually live in the city itself but work and socialize there (due to entertainment venues, stadiums etc.) than Philadelphia.

DC is #2 for pizza? That gave me a good laugh this morning.

Yay, Oakland.

I think philly deserves a higher rating on some of these; they have a decent food scene.

Miami for steak, Atlanta for Tex-Mex. Riiiight.