The Most Diverse Foodie Cities
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I was just wondering
When you think about creating content for brands, the focus is often not on what the company does for their customers, but what that really does for them. It’s the why, not the what. In travel, that can mean it’s not about the flight but the destination.
And when I think about the destinations, I often like to think about WHY people choose certain destinations. One aspect of that is culture, and an important element of culture is the food.
With the rise of food photography online, the foodie traveler had become a real thing.
But the genesis of this idea started a lot earlier than the brief.
One day, not long after I moved to London, I found myself sitting in an Eritrean restaurant with a friend. I wasn’t aware of any Eritrean restaurants back home in Edinburgh, and this got me thinking…
I wondered how many different national cuisines were available in London, and how this compared to other cities around the world.
So when we started exploring travel in relation to food, this curiosity resurfaced, and it found a home.
To create the content, we pulled restaurant review data for every city in the world with a population of over 1 million people. We then analysed the data to determine which national cuisines were on offer in each location.
The top two cities (with the most diverse cuisine on offer) were fairly predictable – New York and London. But beyond that, it got more surprising. Toronto came in at number 3, Dubai made it into the top 10, and Manchester (UK) even featured in the top 50.
You can easily imagine people would be surprised – and even proud – to discover how well their city fared. This opened up lots of media targets, with the story generating a wave of international coverage.
We also revealed how you could eat round the world by visiting the top-rated restaurant for each of the national cuisines available in each city.
Much like the destinations themselves, the graphic proved fascinating to explore and discover.
