menukarma blog

I live in San Francisco, where there is what I would describe as a shitload of Thai restaurants. menukarma has about 150 listings for Thai Restaurant in San Francisco, (map view) but the total number is much bigger. Google local search puts the figure at over a thousand, which feels a lot closer to the truth to me. In some parts of town, there are 2 or 3 on a block for blocks. I’m not a huge fan of Thai, truth be told, so it feels like too many fucking Thai restaurants to me. But, it is hard to argue with their collective success. I wonder if that large number of restaurants reflects the innate demand of the city to consume Thai food. I reckon not. I reckon it’s a combination of factors, not the least of which is the high economic efficiency of many Thai restaurants. If they are the only kind of restaurant surviving in a certain type of available San Francisco retail space, then their success is not the expression of demand, but of something else.

Somebody smart once said that the best arguments are made by stating the obvious. On this blog, I don’t so much want to make arguments as be suggestive. So I am just going to make some obvious statements in suggestive ways, and leave it at that.

The first statement is “The restaurant business has changed.” That’s a big one, and its as obvious as the nose on Gerard Depardieu’s face. On this blog, I’m going to specifically consider how the advent of the Internet has touched the restaurant business. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty among restaurant operators as to the ways their businesses are affected by the Web. I want to try to answer some of those questions from the perspective of someone who trafficks in their menus and names.

The second statement is “America has a terrible diet.” That one is about as obvious as the disconcerting feeling of looseness under your chin. You may think you know who the culprits are, and mostly you’re right. But what you may not know is how the power of Fast Food is being leveraged on the web, in ways that make it a “GAME OVER” for the small, local restaurant before it’s even begun. I want to shed some light on the mechanics of “local web search”, and how national advertising budgets are shaping the web side of the restaurant business.

The third obvious statement is “Location, location, location.” While the location of a restaurant still has the greatest influence on its prospects as a business, the advent of the Web and of certain kinds of web sites, has radically transformed the ways people find and choose the places they eat. On this blog, I’m going to look at how Social Networking on the web touches restaurants. I’m also going to expose the distribution and concentrations of certain types of restaurants in certain cities, to draw conclusions about demand patterns. I’m thinking that my search engine referrer logs can tell me something about what people are looking for and where. That information, combined with information about where restaurants are located could identify opportunities for certain kinds of food in certain places.