1 Jul 2010

The diversity of the Davis restaurant scene

 
I noticed today that Davis will have a new restaurant opening soon. Hooray! I love trying new places to eat. I then noticed that it will be a Thai restaurant. Or should I say, another Thai restaurant. Boo. Don't get me wrong, I love Thai food and I've really enjoyed eating at what was the new (Thai) kid on the block, Taste of Thai. It seems like only yesterday that Taste of Thai opened (in fact it was just two months ago) so I was surprised to see yet another Thai place choose to open. This made me think a little bit about the diversity of the Davis restaurant scene.
 
The Davis Wiki has an excellent page that lists all of the eating establishments in our great town. I took that information and looked at the numbers of ethnic/regional restaurants in Davis. I then focused on just the non-American cuisine (i.e. excluded US and Californian as types of cuisine, and also pizza for that matter), and ignored any places which were take-out only. From the resulting list, I made a pie chart of our restaurant diversity:
 
We are dominated by the 17 Chinese restaurants that account for almost a third of all restaurants in Davis. I was not surprised to see that Japanese and Thai take the next two positions. Collectively these three type of foreign cuisines account for over half of all non-US food eating establishments in Davis. I appreciate that this partly reflects the ethnic diversity of this region, but even so I am surprised that there is sufficient demand for eight different Thai restaurants. Maybe such demand does not exist and the arrival of the new Thai place will put a strain on the existing restaurants. Only time will tell...or should that be 'only Thai-me will tell'?

Update
Here is a map showing where to find all of the Thai restaurants in Davis. Seven of them are all in downtown Davis, so no more than 5 minutes walk from each other.