Battle of the Locations

Restaurants are a notoriously difficult business to own or operate. Not only is it a relatively capital and employee-intensive business, restaurants are also highly regulated, low margin and in most cases have a plethora of competition to deal with. There are more dining establishments and more diners now than during any other time in history; the National Restaurant Association reports over 1 million restaurant locations in the U.S. alone, a particular boon considering more than half the American population visits at least one of them each week. To fill a niche and remain relevant, prospective, as well as established, restaurants have to hedge their bets with well-rounded and well-directed dataset. Data science provides valuable insights regarding market trends and evolving consumer lifestyles so that restaurateurs can better address and meet public demand.

Business Problem

No single restaurant is ever going to appeal to everyone. Some people like quiet, intimate settings; others prefer boisterous ones. Some people want to bring their kids along; others want to dine alone. The preferences are as varied as the possible offerings, with specific generational cohorts preferring one thing, “people who like Indian food” preferring another and everyone else liking a million other things in between.

My client, a successful Indian restaurant chain in Malaysia is looking to expand operation into North America through New York (NYC).

Problem Statement

To locate and recommend to the client which neighbourhood in New York City will be best choice to start a restaurant.

Before opening a new restaurant in NYC, the data science team will provide data and insight to:-

• Part 1: NYC Population & Demographic characteristics

Data source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City. Web scraping techniques was used to get NYC’s population density and demographics data from Wikipedia. Preliminary finding indicates that Queens being the second most populous urban area in New York City (NYC), behind Brooklyn; and the most ethnically diverse urban area in NYC with the highest Asian ethnic minority population. Click here to view Python’s script.

• Part 2: Who are the competitors in that location? (coming soon)

Data source:https://cocl.us/new_york_dataset and Foursquare API. These dataset was used to explore various neighbourhoods and each Indian restaurants venues in the neighbourhood.

Recommendations

Midtown or Tribeca in Manhattan would be the best choice to start an Indian restaurant given that:-

1. it is the third most populous urban area in New York City (NYC).
2. it has a population density of 27,826 people per square km, highest of any borough in the United States.
3. it has the second highest Asian ethnic minority population in NYC.
4. it has some of the top rated Indian restaurants located in that area (i.e. ready-made customer base).

To view more of my data science projects, head to my Github