Chef’s Pencil has recently released their new report featuring the most popular ethnic cuisines in America, listing Austin as America’s 8th most popular city for Mexican cuisine, 9th for Italian and 9th for Indian cuisine.
The report is based on Google Trends data, a reliable source of consumer trends data. What is unique about the data is that it doesn’t only indicate Americans’ dining out habits. It also shows what Americans are eating at home.
Google provides data on a whole range of topics, including national cuisines, and allocates a score that indicates the level of interest in the topic. For example, Japanese cuisine will comprise hundreds or thousands of searches related to the topic such as Japanese restaurants, Japanese rice, sushi, sushi recipes, and even names of well-known local Japanese restaurants.
Google then counts how often they are used in countries, regional areas, towns and cities relative to all local searches and allocates a popularity score. For example, if New Jersey scores 100 for Indian cuisine and New York scores 80, it doesn’t mean more searches were done in New Jersey than in New York; it means a higher percentage of people in New Jersey than in New York are into Indian cuisine.
Top 5 international cuisines according to Google Trends:
1. Chinese (Google Trends Score: 64)
2. Mexican (Google Trends Score: 59)
3. Italian (Google Trends Score: 38)
4. Thai (Google Trends Score: 24)
5. Indian (Google Trends Score: 11)
6. Japanese (Google Trends Score: 10.5)
7. Korean (Google Trends Score: 10)
See state and city rankings in our report: https://chefspencil.