The most common restaurant cuisine in every state, and a chain-restaurant mystery [View all]

[mahatmakanejeeves]

DEPARTMENT OF DATA

The most common restaurant cuisine in every state, and a chain-restaurant mystery

Analysis by Andrew Van Dam
Staff writer

Updated October 1, 2022 at 11:41 a.m. EDT | Published September 29, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

When Clio Andris and Xiaofan Liang gave us early access to the latest update of their delightful data on chain restaurants, they already had identified its most compelling mystery: Places that support Donald Trump also tend to have the most franchise foods. But why? ... It turns out “the foodscape is very political,” said Liang, a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech’s School of City & Regional Planning. “Places with a high percentage of Trump voters have a higher percentage of chains. We didn’t expect it.”

Chain restaurants — those ubiquitous monuments to corporate consistency, from Applebee’s to Arby’s, Olive Garden to Pizza Hut — are most common in Kentucky, West Virginia and Alabama. They’re rarest in Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii. Maine, New York and D.C. also tend to have fewer chains.

The chain restaurant capital of the country is the metro area around Anniston, Ala., home to the Talladega Superspeedway. Nearly 3 in 5 restaurants there are chains. ... Nestled in the southern reaches of Appalachia, off the interstate between Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, Anniston is accustomed to life as a national punching bag. It has been named among the “most dangerous” and “fastest shrinking” cities and appears on lists of the worst places to live and the places where workers are most likely to be replaced by robots. In 2019, local reporter and author Tim Lockette wrote a helpful guide for residents titled, “FIVE THINGS to know when Anniston lands on a ‘10 worst’ list again.”

Anniston lies in Calhoun County, which Trump won in 2020 with 73 percent of the two-party vote, which excludes votes cast for third-party candidates. That makes it an exemplar of the Trump-chain restaurant nexus. In the Trumpiest fifth of the United States, counties where Trump received at least 63.3 percent of the two-party vote in the past presidential election, 37 percent of the restaurants are chains. In the least Trumpy fifth, where Trump received less than 32.1 percent of the vote, it’s 23 percent.

{snip}

By Andrew Van Dam
Andrew Van Dam writes the Department of Data column each week for The Washington Post. He has covered economics and wrangled data and graphics for The Post and the Wall Street Journal. Twitter https://twitter.com/andrewvandam