Bay Area's 139 Indian restaurants, ranked by price, popularity
Leave it to an outsider to do what a local should've done a long time ago: make a thorough accounting of Bay Area Indian restaurants graphed by price and popularity.
Rajesh Niti, a cancer biologist in Tempe, Arizona (who originally hails from Chennai), is the creator of a genius visualization of 139 Indian eateries across the Bay Area, from Palo Alto's Rooh to Berkeley's Vik's Chaat, plotted on axes of “average rating” and “average cost of meal.” The lower left quadrant pens in restaurants that are “cheaper than average but not as tasty,” while the rarefied upper-right corner identifies places that are “more expensive than average and tasty.” (You'll find Los Altos' Aurum and Palo Alto's Ettan there.) The bottomright section is perhaps the sweet spot for most people, where the price is low, and the quality ain't lacking. (Hello, Curry Up Now.)
The data graph was “requested by a graduateschool friend who lives in the Bay Area and, by the way, works at Twitter,” emails Rajesh. “He wanted to know which Indian restaurants served the best food at an affordable price. During my visits to the Bay Area, he and I sampled many restaurants, and the visualization simply identified new places for us to try.”
The graph encompasses San Francisco, the South Bay and East Bay cities like Oakland and Fremont. For the data, Rajesh scraped review websites like Yelp and Zomato and food-delivery sites like Uber Eats and Grubhub. “I only use data from websites which have a significant number of reviews, and avoid any which have just a few as they may skew the visualization,” he says. (On the graph, larger dots represent places with more reviews.)
Rajesh says a couple of things jumped out at him when making his graph. “I discovered that restaurants specializing in North Indian cuisine received higher average ratings than those specializing in South Indian cuisine. This is unfortunate, because there are many wonderful South Indian restaurants, but the cuisine is so different from North Indian food that someone new who goes in expecting naan and butter chicken/chicken tikka masala is unlikely to find it on the menu. And the food tends to be spicier than the usual North Indian fare, which turns off people who don't go in expecting it.”
He also noticed some reviewers were dinging restaurants for things not related to the food, an annoyance he wishes he could excise from the data.
Then there's the fact that certain diners seem unfamiliar with Indian food in general. There's not much that can be done about that, though one person on Reddit offers this possible solution (pending for lack of current technology): “Can we filter the reviewers by Indian names”?
“I spend a lot of my free time in the Bay Area. Because I have so many friends who live here and work in the tech industry, I have to make multiple trips to see different groups of people,” says Rajesh. When he's here, he sometimes ducks into one of his favorite restaurants — Annachikadai in Mountain View, located toward the bottom of the higherquality/higher-cost quadrant — and suggests others do the same:
“They serve truly authentic South Indian cuisine at a very reasonable price. I would recommend trying the `ilai virunthu,' which is a complete meal made up of a variety of dishes.”