Want to know where to find a great Lebanese restaurant? Fancy some French cuisine tonight or perhaps you want to go Mexican?
One of the main reasons that people visit a country or city, of course, is for the food. After all, it’s a big part of dipping our toes in different cultural worlds. Many cities nowadays, however, have vibrant mixes of different people from all over the worlds. That means you’re just as likely to find Asian cuisine alongside South American restaurants in places like New York, Melbourne, London or Paris.
A new online tool allows you to search different cities around the world and find out how diverse their foodie culture is. It’s been developed by Bott and Co who took local restaurant data for cities with a population over 1 million to come up with the top 50 most diverse . The restaurants that made the list for a specific national cuisine also had to appear in Google Maps.
An easy to use list with links allow you to look at each city in detail and get a map with colour coded spots for each national cuisine (red for European, blue for North American and so on).
So which cities have the most diverse eating cultures?
The answers may not surprise those who travel widely. New York is top of the list with 94 national cuisines represented. From Café Katja on Orchard Street to the Somalian Safari on 116th Street, there’s more than enough choice wherever you go in the Big Apple.
London is next on the list with 89 different cuisines including niche restaurants like the Pasha Kyrgyz Kazakh House and the Bariloche, Argentinian Grill & Bar.
Both cities are home to diverse cultures from around the world. The US features better than most when it comes to diversity with 4 cities coming in the top ten.
The popularity of different cuisines can be slightly less predictable. Bosnian cooking, for example, gets pretty good ratings but only features in 10 of the top 50 cities. Dishes you can expect are Cevapi which are essentially small kebabs and Burek, the Bosnian equivalent of the Cornish Pasty. Ethiopian, French and Greek area also generally popular choices across the world. Local doesn’t always mean cultural either – New York generally has the largest number of Asian restaurants while London hosts the most African restaurants.
Major cities with the least diversity on the list of 50 include Brisbane with only 40 national cuisines available and Moscow that offers just 34 including Belarusian and Georgian delights.
The tool allows you to quickly take a look at any of the big cities around the world and find out where different national cuisines can be found. For example, if you’re visiting Berlin, you discover that 64 nationalities are represented, from Serbian and Spanish to Syrian and Iraqi as well as Cuban and Mexican. Click on the spot and you get an address and link to Google Maps so you can take a closer look at the restaurant you want to choose and the food that’s on offer.
