More than one in ten restaurants in the US serve Mexican food, according to study

In 11% of all restaurants in the United States predominantly Mexican food is served and 85% of the country’s 3,244 counties have at least one Mexican restaurantan analysis by the Pew Center revealed this Thursday.

The analysis also noted that although Mexican-Americans constitute the largest Hispanic group in the country with 37.2 million people, 40% of Latinos say they have other origins. However, only 2% of restaurants serve Hispanic food other than Mexican.

The most common types of non-Mexican Hispanic restaurants include Caribbean, Cuban, Peruvian, Salvadoran, and Spanish food establishments. But no one type makes up more than 1% of the country’s restaurants.

Mexican restaurants also tend to have modest prices.

Among restaurants with pricing data, 61% are rated as a single “Dollar sign”, the cheapest of a total of four price scales on the Yelp platform. Less than 1% of all Mexican restaurants nationwide – just 251 in total – have a rating of three or four.

Restaurants serving primarily Mexican food are especially common in California and Texasstates where the majority of the Mexican-American population lives, with 22% of all these establishments in the first and 17% in the second.

Los Angeles County alone has 30% of California’s Mexican restaurants. In Texas, 17% of these establishments are in Harris County, which includes Houston, while Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, and Dallas County have 9% each.

The states of Florida, New York and Illinois also host large numbers of these businesses, each with 4% of the national total, indicates the study by the Washington-based research center, based on data from the SafeGraph platform, which records information of millions of sites of interest around the world.

Likewise, Mexican restaurants constitute a particularly high proportion of these businesses in states bordering Mexico, representing 22% in New Mexico, 20% in Texas, 18% in Arizona and 17% in California.

The study found that 22% of Mexican restaurants in the country are fast food, 12% specialize in serving tacos, 8% are classified as food trucks or carts and 6% offer food ‘Tex-Mex’.

These businesses tend to have modest prices. 61% of them are rated in the lower tier of review site Yelp’s four-point price scale.

Less than 1% of all Mexican restaurants (251) rank a three or four on that scale, and about a quarter of the most expensive are in Los Angeles, California, Cook, Illinois, and New York counties. York (New York).

On the other hand, although many non-Mexican restaurants also offer Mexican food, the opposite is less common. For example, 38% of Salvadoran restaurants also serve Mexican foodbut only 3% of Mexican restaurants offer other types of Hispanic dishes.

These Hispanic establishments represent a relatively high proportion of restaurants in states such as Florida (especially Miami-Dade County) or in New York and New Jersey near New York City.

“But even in those areas, Mexican restaurants make up a comparable, and often larger, portion of establishments serving other types of Hispanic food,” concludes the study.