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By Ed Avis
Mexican restaurants make up 11 percent of the restaurants in the United States, and 99 percent of the population has at least one Mexican restaurant in their county, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.
“Although especially common in California and Texas, Mexican restaurants are found in a large majority of counties in the U.S.,” the report says.
Naturally, the states with the highest Hispanic population have the most Mexican restaurants. California and Texas alone account for 40 percent of the Mexican restaurants in the United States, according to the analysis, which was based on data from SafeGraph, a company that curates information about millions of places of interest and the user review site Yelp. That figure matches the subscriber data from el Restaurante magazine – California alone accounts for a quarter of our readers.
Here are some other interesting findings from the Pew study:
- Los Angeles County has 30 percent of the Mexican restaurants in California
- 22 percent of all the restaurants in New Mexico are Mexican, compared to 20 percent in Texas and 18 percent in Arizona
- 22 percent of Mexican restaurants are “fast food” restaurants, 12 percent specialize in tacos, 8 percent are food trucks or carts, and 6 percent are “Tex-Mex.”
- 61 percent of Mexican restaurants are rated as one “dollar sign” on Yelp’s four-point pricing scale. Only 251 Mexican restaurants on Yelp have a rating of three or four dollar signs.
Want more data? Click here to read the whole report
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