Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Yelp's Word Map

The Yelp Wordmap has been making the rounds on numerous websites. There is a common spin about seeing "where the hipsters live" but there's much more to it than that. The map allows you to pick one of 14 cities and a number of search terms that appear in restaurant reviews. For example, the default choice; "hipster" in San Francisco.
The term "noodles" gives you a good sense of where the Asian restaurants are such as in Seatlle's "International District" just south of the original skid row - now Yesler Way.
Many of the search words are the same but a few are customized for the city represented such as hoagies in Philadelphia. The biggest cluster is in the Italian Market area of South Philly but there are lots of other hoagie enclaves. Hoagies are traditionally associated with Italian-American culture and those settlement patterns are reflected here.
Unfortunately Yelp's information does not go far enough out from the city center to include the Tacony Hoagie Trail but this map will guide you there.

For a European perspective there are the brasseries of Paris. There is not really much of a pattern here because just about every neighborhood has its own brasseries.
Choose a city and explore - or (depending on where you're from) be annoyed that Austin made the list while your much larger city didn't.

No comments: