New York City and Los Angeles are the two most populated US cities, and each city has an overwhelming amount of diversity, especially in terms of ethnic restaurants. It has been an ongoing debate as to which city's cuisines reign supreme. I am here to offer statistical insight into this matter. Keep in mind, this is only using restaurant ratings from Yelp (as of Nov 1, 2014).Using the Yelp API, I compared the ratings of the top 40 rated restaurants in New York City and Los Angeles from 119 different restaurant categories. Out of these categories I took only the categories that had at least 100 Yelp certified restaurants in each city to avoid low sampling biases and to ensure fair comparisons. Here is what I found.
Among the top 40 restaurants in each city, New York City offered more highly rated French, Italian, Tex-Mex, and Thai restaurants as compared to Los Angeles.
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| *: p<0.05 |
Los Angeles, on the other hand, offered more highly rated BBQ, fast food, Korean, Mexican, and salad restaurants among its top 40 as compared to New York City.
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| *: p<0.05, **: p<0.01, ***: p<0.001 |
Note that all the findings I previously reported were statistically significant using an unpaired two-sample t-test, assuming unequal variances, with a p-value less than 5%. The categories of restaurants that did not come out significantly different between cities were:
- New American
- Traditional American
- Asian Fusion
- Breakfast Brunch
- Burgers
- Cafes
- Chicken Wings
- Chinese
- Delis
- Diners
- Hot Dog
- Indian/Pakistani
- Japanese
- Latin
- Mediterranean
- Middle Eastern
- Pizza
- Sandwiches
- Seafood
- Steak
- Sushi
- Vegan
- Vegetarian
- Vietnamese
So there you have it, Yelp has spoken (as of November 1st, 2014), and we are left a little bit more insightful about what kinds of restaurants to choose in our next foray to these great cities.
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