Metropolitan areas with many options for places to eat offers many quality of life benefits to residents.
Joe Cortright explains the importance of restaurants to the quality of life and experience of U.S. cities.
One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.
With those hallmarks in mind, Cortright shares an index of restaurants per capita as one indicator of where dining choice is greatest, assembled with data on the number of restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012.
"The top six metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, New York, Providence, Boston, Seattle and Portland," writes Cortright. "Each of these cities has twenty or more restaurants per 10,000 population."
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