Where is the food buzz happening in San Francisco?
An analysis of the food Twitterverse
It’s official, I’m moving to San Francisco. Now, the big question is where should I live.
What Exists
Everyone seems to agree that SF is a great food mecca. But are there particular neighborhoods that have a higher concentration of food buzz — that is where I want to live.
Upon quick Google search of “best food neighborhoods” or “best restaurant neighborhoods”, I noticed only lists of best restaurants in each neighborhood and not a comparison of the neighborhoods themselves. Next, I proceeded to Yelp and sort by highest rated. The problem here is that Yelp only shows 10 at a time on the map.
Given nothing seems readily available, it’s a blank slate for me to try to find where is the highest concentration of great food.
Am I willing to live with the assumptions?
The assumption I decided to pursue was:
The best food neighborhoods has the most Twitter food chatter.
You can poke a lot of holes in this assumption. For example, not all tweets are geo-tagged or many people do not tweet the good food they eat. However, I think this analysis should be directionally correct. I believe if people REALLY like the food they eat, they will tweet/Instagram it. Plus, I see a lot of people taking pictures of their food at popular restaurants.
In addition, the population I care about the most is the people likely to share my passion for food and open to conversation. The food Twitterverse seems to be a great indication of where this population is eating.
After Googling the most used food hash tags, I collected a week worth of geo-tagged #food, #foodporn, #foodie, #nomnom, and #yum to answer my question of “where is the food buzz happening.”
Confirming the food meccas of continental US
Twitter data aligns with the popular belief that the food meccas of the United States included San Francisco. This data’s alignment with intuition made me very happy. It helped me gain a firmer confidence that the method I chose would yield directionally correct conclusions.
Speaking of conclusions, I would say that the top 3 active food cities in the US are:
- New York
- Los Angeles/Orange County
- San Francisco
It is followed by Miami, Chicago, and Atlanta.
Digging deeper into San Francisco
Now that I am comfortable with the method, plotting the food tweets of SF area reveals 3 main conclusions.
- There is a higher concentration of food tweets in San Francisco downtown than from across the Bay in Oakland.
- The hottest food spot is in the Financial District by the ferry plaza, followed by Alamo Square.
- Within 1 mile of Civic Center area, you can cover most of the hot food spots.
3 Bonus Insights
Where do people with the most followers eat?
For kicks and giggle, let’s say I wanted to bump into a “Twitter celebrity” (defined to be someone with more than 1,000 followers), where should I go eat?
The answer aligns with the food hot spots of SF: near the Ferry Plaza or Alamo Square.
Most used food hashtags
I have never thought of eating as a very “sexy” activity. Nevertheless, the number 1 food related hashtag is #foodporn. When you scan down the top 20, #foodgasm takes the number 12 spot.
Another piece of tidbit is that people like to # the meal they are having, whether it is lunch, dinner, or brunch.
In addition, people eating in New York City like to specifically flag that they are in #NYC even though they already geotagged their tweet.
Most common number of #
I’m not a big tweeter, maybe I will become one once I live in San Francisco. My tweets usually contain 1 or maybe 2 hashtags.
When I started looking at the data, every tweet seemed to be # followed by # (some even are purely hashtags). I was intrigued to dig deeper.
On average, there were 4.7 hashtags per tweet. That’s a lot more hashtags than my tweets.
Over to you
What’s your favorite San Francisco food neighborhood? Would you tweet about your food?
