Dining out as cultural trade

Abstract

Perceptions of Anglo-American dominance in movie and music trade motivate restrictions on cultural trade. Yet, the market for another cultural good, food at restaurants, is roughly ten times larger than the markets for music and film. Using TripAdvisor data on restaurant cuisines, along with Euromonitor data on overall and fast-food expenditure, this paper calculates implicit trade patterns in global cuisines for 52 destination countries. We obtain four results. First, the pattern of cuisine trade resembles the “gravity” patterns in physically traded products. Second, after accounting gravity factors, the most popular cuisines are Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and American. Third, excluding fast food, the largest net exporters of their cuisines are the Italians and the Japanese, while the largest net importers are the USA—with a 2015 deficit of over $140 billion—followed by Brazil, China, and the UK. With fast food included, the US deficit shrinks to $55 billion but remains the largest net importer along with China and, to a lesser extent, the UK and Brazil. Fourth, cuisine trade patterns more closely resemble migration patterns than patterns of food trade or patterns arising from the extent of arable land in origin countries. Cuisine trade patterns run starkly counter to the audiovisual patterns that have motivated concern about Anglo-American cultural dominance.

Appendix: TripAdvisor versus Yelp and Tabelog

TripAdvisor is not the only source of restaurant information. Yelp is another major source of information, and Yelp is popular in the USA. Tabelog.com, by contrast, is popular in Japan. Here, we compare cuisine distributions between TripAdvisor and Yelp, in the USA, and between TripAdvisor and Tabelog, for Japan.

1.1 TripAdvisor versus Yelp

Like TripAdvisor, Yelp classifies restaurants into roughly 120 cuisines, of which 61 match exactly across sources.

Almost half—61—cuisines match directly across the two data sources. These matching cuisines account for just over half of the US cuisine listings, 47.3% in TripAdvisor and 50.5 in Yelp. The shares are highly correlated across data sources (correlation = 0.94), as shown in Fig. 13, which shows the plot of the TripAdvisor share against the Yelp share. For example, Mexican restaurants account for 5.2% of the cuisines in TripAdvisor and 6.8% in Yelp. Italian accounts for 5.4% in TA and 3.5% in Yelp, but pizza is 5.2 in TA and 6.8% in Yelp, perhaps reflecting a different distinction between pizza and Italian in the two data sources. We take the high correlation as evidence supportive of the validity of the TripAdvisor data.

1.2 TripAdvisor versus Tabelog

An article at Eater (Nomura 2017) describes Tabelog as “the definitive catalog of restaurants in Japan.” According to Nomura (2017), the crowd-sourced site “might sound a lot like Yelp, but there's a key difference: it is much, much better (even if it looks uglier).”

I obtained data on 1000 restaurants from each of Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Kyoto, as well as 200 restaurants from each of the remaining 41 cities listed at Tabelog.com. Each of these restaurants lists up to three cuisines at Tabelog. I then mapped these cuisines into nine categories: French, Indian, Italian, Mexican, American, Japanese, and other (non-Japanese). I did the same thing for the listed cuisines for the restaurants from the 158 Japanese cities in the TripAdvisor data. This gives me 39,612 cuisines listings from Tabelog and 1,362,828 from TripAdvisor.

Table

Table 7 Cuisine distributions for Japan cities, Tabelog.com versus TripAdvisor

7 shows the resulting cuisine distributions. Japanese cuisines (including ageographic cuisines such as “bar”) account for 86.31% in the Tabelog data, compared with 81.81% in the TripAdvisor data. French accounts for 1.56% in Tabelog and 1.89% in TripAdvisor. Italian accounts for 5.76% in Tabelog and 4.68% in TripAdvisor. We take the similarity of these cuisine distributions, along with the Yelp evidence for the USA, as evidence supporting the use of TripAdvisor.

1.3 TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Tabelog usage

Based on the volume of Google searches for the terms Yelp and TripAdvisor, it is clear that Yelp is more popular in the USA than is TripAdvisor. Yelp has twice as many US searches as TripAdvisor, as given in Table

Table 8 Countries with the highest Yelp search intensity relative to TripAdvisor.

8. Outside of the USA, TripAdvisor is far more popular. Yelp accounts for a third of the searches to one of the two sources in Guam, just over a quarter in Pakistan, about a fifth in Bangladesh, just under a fifth in Canada, Kosovo, and Syria.

Among the major countries in Europe, Yelp accounts for 10% in Germany, 2% in France, 1% in Spain and the UK, and less that a percent in Italy. Usage in Asia is similarly, although slightly less, skewed toward TripAdvisor: Yelp accounts for 13% of searches for either Yelp or TripAdvisor in South Korea, 10% in China, Taiwan, and Japan.

We take the relatively low usage of Yelp outside of the USA as an obstacle to its use as a source of information on the distribution of restaurant cuisines around the world. Despite that drawback, the Yelp data are useful to us as a check on the TripAdvisor data. It would be reassuring if the two sources indicated similar cuisine distributions in a country they both cover extensively, the USA.

Tabelog, which is indexed in Google trends as kakaku.com, is searched only in Japan, where its searches account for 71% of the searches for the three sites.