Chartsandgraphs: looking back at the 2014 Spring Restaurant Week
Chartsandgraphs returns with a look at some of the information buried in this spring’s Restaurant Week menus.
Popular menus
Here’s a list of the top ten most-visited menus on RVANews. As you can see, The Blue Goat menu outpaced the rest of the field by a fair margin. They drove a significant amount of traffic to their menu by linking to it from bluegoatva.com.
Four of the restaurants listed below had menus in 2012’s most-visited menus list as well (Helen’s, Acacia Mid-town, Julep’s, and Bistro Bobette).
— ∮∮∮ —
Trends
Below are some of the most popular ingredients and cooking methods featured in this spring’s batch of menus. Fried pork with chocolate potatoes for everyone!
Protiens |
|
|---|---|
| Word / phrase | Frequency |
| pork | 26 |
| chicken | 25 |
| bacon | 16 |
| crab | 16 |
| goat | 16 |
| shrimp | 15 |
| sausage | 14 |
| salmon | 11 |
| beef | 9 |
| lobster | 8 |
Fruit and veg |
|
|---|---|
| Word / phrase | Frequency |
| potatoes | 26 |
| mushroom | 25 |
| apple | 21 |
| spinach | 19 |
| tomatoes | 19 |
| lemon | 18 |
| asparagus | 16 |
| arugula | 13 |
| onion | 12 |
| corn | 11 |
Dessert |
|
|---|---|
| Word / phrase | Frequency |
| chocolate | 30 |
| vanilla | 18 |
| cake | 15 |
| ice cream | 9 |
| pie | 9 |
| whipped cream | 8 |
| key lime | 6 |
Cooking method |
|
|---|---|
| Word / phrase | Frequency |
| roasted | 53 |
| fried | 30 |
| grilled | 28 |
| smoked | 24 |
| seared | 21 |
| pickled | 13 |
| braised | 10 |
Bonus: The most common three-word phrase…”fried green tomatoes” (6)!
— ∮∮∮ —
Unintentionally hilarious word cloud
Part of putting together our Restaurant Week coverage involves copy, pasting, and editing each of the menus. This is pretty tedious work, but you get a chance to see each and every menu and pick up on some of those trends. Here’s a word cloud from which you can draw your own conclusions. Note: word clouds are fairly useless for doing any sort of real analysis and are mostly just pretty pictures.
Additionally, here are some of my favorite unintentional (and very Guy Fieri-esque) Restaurant Week dishes found in the above cloud:
- Fried shrimp garlic
- Braised goat olives
- Candied, toasted pork asparagus
- Stuffed red salad
- Green butter soup
- Kale baby, sautéed
- Homemade house gastrique
-
Recommend this
on Facebook -
Report an error
-
Subscribe to our
Weekly Digest
Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.