Opening a Restaurant in Manhattan

Most of us can admire the beauty of this place only by looking at its pictures but only a few are the privileged ones who get a chance to visit this beautiful place. Well, this place…. yes! it’s none other than New York City. This place, in particular, is one of the five boroughs in the city, named Manhattan. And this here, ladies and gentlemen, is The Manhattan Skyline!!

So, enough of the buildup, let’s get straight into the point. Manhattan is considered the financial centre of the world. And there are a lot of people who migrate here in search of a good lifestyle. But, life isn’t easy here also, one has to go through a lot of difficulties to lead a normal life here. There is a lot of competition here, be it in the business sector, jobs, etc. And today we will try to solve a problem for those who want to open a restaurant here.

Business Problem

The business problem that we are going to discuss here is, if a person is willing to open a restaurant here, which type of restaurant and at which exact location he/she should open so that the restaurant faces the least competition and eventually this business becomes successful. Let’s see, being a data science enthusiast what can I do to help these kinds of people.

About the Dataset

We have a dataset representing the neighborhoods in all the five boroughs in New York City. After converting the data into a pandas dataframe the data looks like this…

This is only the first 5 rows of the dataset.

Now, another thing on which we are going to rely on is the Foursquare API. this will help us in getting a list of all the venues within a certain range.

Methodology

Now let’s discuss about the methodology that we are going to follow.

1. We’ll get the list of all neighborhoods in the city of New York. We will then show the map of New York City with all the neighborhoods marked as labels.
2. Then we’ll move on to Manhattan, We’ll get the list of all the neighborhoods of Manhattan, and plot the Folium map.
3. Then using the Foursquare API, we’ll get the list of all the venues in the neighborhood of Manhattan.
4. We’ll then divide the neighborhoods into Five clusters using the Machine Learning algorithm called K-Means Clustering algorithm.
5. Then we will examine all these clusters and suggest a favorable location to open a restaurant so that it faces the least competition.

Results and Discussions

First of all, we got the Map of New York City and all its neighborhoods and it looks like this:

This was for the whole of New York City, but we need to confine our study till Manhattan only.

So, we will extract the dataset of Manhattan from the parent dataset. After extracting the neighborhoods in Manhattan looked like this:

Now, that we got all the neighborhoods we’ll use the Foursquare API to to make calls to get the list of all the venues in Manhattan. The resultant data is in .json format, so we’ll have to convert it into pandas DataFrame, and after that, we’ll design the data frame such that the top 5 venues for each neighborhood is available.The data frame will look like this:

We’ll cluster all the neighborhoods and label all of them, The labelled dataframe looks like this:

Then we’ll Apply KMeans Clustering and label all the Neighbors accordingly. in total, we will divide the neighborhoods of Manhattan into five clusters.We will then plot the clustered neighborhoods over the map of Manhattan using the folium Library. The End result looks like this:

So, Here we can see that similar Neighborhoods have similar colored labels.

Conclusion

To make conclusions we’ll have to see what are the characteristics of all these clusters, meaning what kind of venues are common in which areas.

Clusters One to Five are Shown below in these five dataframes:

Report on cluster 1

We can clearly see that this cluster, which is represented by a red color on the map has a lot of Italian Restaurants. Therefore opening an Italian restaurant would be a really bad idea in this region. In case you just want to open a cafe or a coffee shop this could be a good place since it doesn’t have much competition in this sector.

Report on Cluster 2

This cluster covers the majority of the region in Manhattan, and it’s clearly visible that it has a lot of restaurants and in such huge amounts, so this region should not be considered for opening any restaurant or a cafe.

Report on Cluster 3

This region doesn't have a lot of restaurants especially if someone wants to open an Italian restaurant….this is the most favorable region to do so. Especially, near Colombia University in the 116th street. It doesn’t have much competition and this region is well-populated as well.

Report on Cluster 4

So, this place may not be good for opening any restaurant because this region basically consists of Boat Yards and people who would come in this region are most likely to go and enjoy their time on the boat. However, if someone wants to open a takeaway restaurant it might be a good place because people who are going on the boat may like to carry some food with them.

Report on Cluster 5

This region is slightly away from the residential area, so there might not be that many customers present in this region. Therefore, I would not recommend opening a restaurant here.

Final Recommendation by me

If someone actually wants to open a restaurant in Manhattan and wants to make a profit out of it, they should open an Italian restaurant and that too in the regions of cluster 3.

Why Italian? Because the data above directs us to the conclusion that people in New York City love to eat Italian Cuisine.

What would be the best spot? According to me, the best spot would be somewhere near 116th street near Columbia University.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashank-verma-5a671316b/

Github: https://github.com/Shashank1816