By Gene Balk From The Seattle Times
Seattle—It’s no secret that Seattle-area diners love Asian cuisine. Now there’s data that proves just how much.King County is one of just eight U.S. counties where at least 25 percent of restaurants serve Asian food, according to a new report from Pew Research Center.
Pew analyzed data from SafeGraph, a company that gathers high-precision data on millions of places, including all known restaurants in the United States. According to SafeGraph, the U.S. has more than 787,000 restaurants across the nation and 12 percent of them serve Asian food. That share is higher than the 7 percent of the U.S. population that is Asian.
Honolulu County in Hawaii has the highest percentage of restaurants serving Asian food at 33 percent. Hawaii also has the highest percentage of Asian residents of any state at around 37 percent, according to 2022 census data.
Six other counties have more than one-quarter of its restaurants serving Asian food, four of which are in the Bay Area: Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda and San Mateo counties. The two other counties to make the cut are Queens in New York City and Fairfax in northern Virginia.
Every state has at least one restaurant serving an Asian cuisine, as do nearly three-quarters of U.S. counties. Forty-five percent of the nation’s Asian restaurants are concentrated in five states with large Asian populations: California, New York, Texas, New Jersey and Washington. The majority of Asian people in the U.S.—55 percent—live in those five states.
According to the most recent census data, 10 percent of Washington’s population is Asian, and in King County, the share is at 21 percent. Chinese restaurants are by far the most popular nationally, making up 39 percent of Asian restaurants. Japanese restaurants rank second, comprising 28 percent of Asian restaurants, and Thai restaurants are third most popular, at 11 percent.
Another local nod in the Pew report: Snohomish County stands out when it comes to Japanese restaurants. Eight percent of all restaurants in Snohomish County serve Japanese food, which ranks second highest among U.S. counties. Honolulu County was first at 13 percent.
I also looked at some local market-research data from Nielsen to see whether it confirmed what Pew found about the popularity of Asian fare among Seattle-area restaurant goers.
It did. Among the roughly 2.5 million people 18 and older who live in King and Snohomish counties, nearly half—1.2 million—said they had eaten at a restaurant that served Asian food in the past 30 days.
About 27 percent of Seattle-area residents said they'd eaten at a Chinese restaurant in the past 30 days, barely edging out Thai restaurants, which were visited by 26 percent.
Asian food as a whole was the most popular in the Seattle area, with 46 percent of people in King and Snohomish Counties saying they‘d visited at least one type of Asian restaurant in the past 30 days. But the single most popular restaurant fare wasn’t an Asian cuisine. Mexican restaurants ranked No. 1 locally, with 30 percent saying they’d been to one in the past month.
Italian restaurants—depending on what you include in that list—were nearly as popular as Mexican restaurants. According to Nielsen, 14.5 percent of Seattle-area adults visited an Italian restaurant in the past 30 days, just half the number who visited a Mexican restaurant. However, if you include pizzerias with Italian restaurants, that figure doubles to 29 percent
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