What is The Most Popular Restaurant Cuisine

What is The Most Popular Restaurant Cuisine

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Posted 2012-08-26 by Dave Walshfollow
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Indian food is incredibly popular in Australia (it's practically an institution in the UK), and there are possibly more Indian restaurants than almost any other ethnic cuisine in Australia. I say "almost" because I think Italian may be a clear winner if you count pizza places.

But which cuisine is really the most popular?

I was so intrigued by this question that I started Googling, without any real success. None of the food sites seemed to care about total numbers, just where the restaurants are and how they rate.

So I called the Bureau of Statistics to ask if they had any figures on restaurant cuisines. Nada - unless I want to pay $400 for a special consultation.

OK I thought, how about some very rough figures? So I did a quick search of Yellow Pages by selected ethnic cuisines for South Australia, and got some quite bizarre results. It was only after I looked at an individual restaurant listing that I discovered the reason for this.

Quite a few restaurants that are clearly Indian (for example) advertise in Yellow Pages that they serve all the following varieties of food: Asian, Australian, Chinese, Dutch, French, Indian, International, Irish, Italian, Polish. Hmmm would you order black pudding and colcannon (or fish and chips) at an Indian restaurant?

I called the Yellow Pages people, but they said they didn't keep any record of the "real" cuisines offered by restaurants. I found that most food sites did not have a particularly accurate or current list of restaurants either.

At Australian Restaurants Directory I finally found a list that looked reasonably accurate. Checking with the owner confirmed that they had recently checked and updated their data. Unfortunately they weren't able to give me access to their complete database, but I did a number of searches that gave me data on selected cuisines (pizza bars excluded).



The leading cuisine in every capital city except Sydney is Chinese.

Perhaps not a surprising result just based on personal observation, but I was surprised that in Sydney the Thai cuisine ruled supreme. I was so surprised that I queried this with Sydney people in a forum. It evoked some quite spirited discussion, but regarding Thai places in Sydney someone summed up the general feeling: "There is a ridiculous number of Thai places in Sydney, especially in Newtown".

Interestingly there was a common suggestion that many Thai restaurants are actually Laotian run, but branded otherwise because of the cuisine's popularity.

Other notable things to be seen from the results:
  • there are more Greek restaurants in Melbourne than anywhere else (doh)
  • Mexican seems quite popular everywhere except Hobart
  • The popularity of Indian is well behind Chinese in most cities

  • So how do these fit in with your perceptions? Are there any other surprises in the data? Let us know in the comments.

    #asian_restaurants
    #chinese_restaurants
    #food_wine
    #french_restaurants
    #greek_restaurants
    #indian_restaurants
    #italian_restaurants
    #mexican_restaurants
    #pizza_restaurants
    #restaurants
    #thai_restaurants
    #questions
    %wneverywhere
    91667 - 2023-06-11 08:42:41

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