Ethnic Foodscapes: Foreign Cuisines in the United States

Existing scholarship on consumption has focused on how purchasing patterns vary by age, race, and socioeconomic status. This article opens a new perspective by asking how consumption is distributed geographically and how these patterns are associated with neighborhood characteristics. This paper departs from previous studies of consumption by concentrating on not just what is consumed but where. Merging data from Google Places with demographic data from the American Consumer Survey produced a data-set with occupations, ethnic composition, and incomes of neighborhood residents as well as the number and type of ethnic restaurants. Census tracts with high percentages of professionals and highly educated residents have a greater diversity of restaurant genres, whereas wealthier census tracts have less diversity. The share of residents in knowledge-intensive jobs impacts the number of ethnic cuisines in a census tract. So does the immigrant population, but this association takes on different forms for three types of cuisines: destination, popular, and enclave. Traditionally sophisticated destination cuisines, like French and Japanese, thrive in elite neighborhoods independent of ethnic composition and income. Mexican and Chinese restaurants are popular in all sorts of neighborhoods, almost independent of ethnic composition, while more exotic cuisines, like Vietnamese and Cuban, remain largely confined to immigrant enclaves.