When you’re grabbing dinner on your way home from work, do you stop by a fast food chain, or an independent restaurant? How easy is it to “eat local” in Nashville?
We took a look at the Restaurant Chaininess Map (made by a lab at Georgia Tech’s Center for Spatial Analysis and Visualization) to see how many restaurants in Music City are considered chains.
The map scores cities based on the number of other restaurants that share their name in the US — so if we opened a restaurant called NASHtoday, we would have a score of 1, while McDonald’s has a chaininess score of over 10,000.
On the map, the darker red dots are chains + the yellow dots are independent restaurants.
When you search for Nashville (using the box in the bottom left), zoom out to the greater Metro area. It gives the total number of restaurants pictured in the region + their average chaininess score — 2,092 restaurants, with a chaininess score of 1,243.
So is that score high or low? Let’s compare. Raleigh (hey, RALtoday) has a chaininess score of 1,378 out of 2,435 restaurants. Pretty similar. If you go up north to somewhere like Philadelphia, the scores start getting lower — 345 out of 5,133 restaurants.
We looked at the numbers of a few fast food chains in Nashville, and McDonalds + Starbucks appear to have the most locations with over 30 locations each.
Taco Bell has 18 locations, Wendy’s has 14, and Sonic has 13. Plus, Whataburger, Raising Cane’s, and Huey Magoo’s have all announced future locations in the region.
When looking at the map, the red spots in Nashville are clustered around major corridors like Charlotte, Nolensville, and Gallatin Pikes, to name a few, but neighborhoods central to downtown are yellow.
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