Where restaurants cluster

If you want a quick sense of a neighborhood, look at where people eat. Restaurants are one of the most common kinds of business in the country. On CheckThisBiz, 588,447 listings are categorized as restaurants, 7.6% of all business listings, or about one in 13.

That is only part of the food and drink world. The wider Food & Drink group has 953,864 listings. Restaurants make up 62% of them; the rest include casual eatery, alcoholic beverage venue and non alcoholic beverage venue.

Where the most restaurants are

By raw count, New York, NY has the most restaurant listings, 14,305. Chicago, IL follows with 7,846, then Los Angeles, CA with 7,455. Counts like these mostly track the overall size of a place: the biggest business centers have the most of nearly everything.

Where restaurants are the biggest slice

A more revealing question is where restaurants make up the largest share of local businesses. Among places with at least 1,500 listings, Astoria, NY stands out: 24% of its listed businesses are restaurants, compared with 7.6% nationally. Flushing, NY (24%) and Ocean City, MD (19%) come next.

The data does not say why. A high share can reflect many things: a destination dining scene, a place that draws visitors, or simply a town with fewer offices and shops to balance out its restaurants. It is a description of the local business mix, not a ranking of food quality.

State by state

At the state level, restaurants make up the largest share of listings in District of Columbia (15%), followed by New Jersey (11%) and Hawaii (11%). The lowest share is in North Dakota, at 4.8%. The gap between top and bottom is 10.5 percentage points, a noticeable difference in how local business is mixed from one state to another.

Planning a meal somewhere new? Every city above links to its restaurant listings on CheckThisBiz, where you can check that a place is open and reachable before you go.