Real estate blog Estately.com has proven, incontrovertably, something that we all already knew was true: Texans like tacos more than anybody else likes tacos.
In a post on Estately called “The Most/Least Taco-Crazed Cities In America,” the blog analyzed the fifty largest cities in the U.S. to determine which cities loved tacos the most, and which city residents were content to drive through a Taco Bell. The methodology is perhaps a bit suspect, but quantifying taco love is an inherently subjective enterprise, and we’ll give them some credit for at least revealing how they came up with the list:
To determine the level of taco enthusiasm in the largest 50 U.S. cities, Estately looked at three things.
- Percentage of each city’s restaurants serving tacos (souce: Yelp)
- Percentage of Facebook users in each city expressing interest in tacos (source: Facebook)
- Level of internet searches related to tacos (source: Google Trends)
We’ll take just a moment here to savor a string of words like “level of Internet searches related to tacos,” but then continue on with the list, in which each of the top five cities are right here in Texas—with seldom-remarked-upon Arlington taking the number one spot.
Behind Arlington, the list includes Fort Worth, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio, while Houston clocks in at #9 (tied with Los Angeles)—behind taco-mad non-Texan cities like Long Beach, Oklahoma City, and San Diego. El Paso—the final Texas entry in the top fifty—lands at #15.
That’s a few spots behind little-known taco meccas like Omaha, Nashville, and Kansas City, which suggests that there is perhaps something going on in Omaha that is worth investigating after all.
The bottom of the list, meanwhile, contains few surprises for anyone who has ever tried to get a decent taco in a place like Boston, Philadelphia, or New York City.
Other places we’d apparently hate to live include burgeoning tech hubs in North Carolina like Raleigh and Charlotte (#45 and #27, respectively), Austin’s hipster sister city in the Pacific Northwest, Portland (#41), and a surprising entry from the Southwest in Albuquerque (#38), which makes us wonder what people in New Mexico’s largest city actually eat.
The actual charts compiled by Estately offer further data to mine, if one is so inclined: One is more likely to find a taco in a given restaurant in Long Beach, California, than anywhere else—a higher-percentage of that city’s eateries serve them than in other cities—but the second-most taco-heavy city in the country, Oakland, doesn’t place on the list until #30, because people rarely talk taco on the Internet. In Arlington, meanwhile, taco enthusiasts who are presumably looking for a bite to eat after a trip to Six Flags or the Cowboys’ stadium have tilted the third item in the methodology to allow them the top spot.
None of this matters even a bit, as long as you live somewhere where good tacos are easy to find—but if you’re a Texpatriate living in New York and wondering if there are really no good tacos to be had, or if it’s just you, we regret to inform you that it’s not just you.
