mapping 30 meals

August 24, 2007 in food, infodesign

In the rush of activity before UX Week, I neglected to post a little map visualization I made that corresponds to Josh Sens’ article in the new San Francisco Magazine. Once again, I found a dead tree article whose online version had missed an opportunity to add some much needed context and depth – hell, anything – to the substance of what had been written. So I did it myself.

The online version of the article is truncated, but the original had a listing of 30 meals the author enjoyed around the Bay Area. I don’t agree with all of the choices, but I thought it’d be interesting to plot out all the locations. To each place and cited dish/drink/whatever, I added a link to it’s entry on Yelp, and a binary indication if you can make a reservation on Open Table.

Most of the interesting data (for me, anyway) falls out of the visual representation: there’s a good split between SF restaurants and East Bay ones, and the author went out of his way to include a South Bay and Napa entry, if only to widen the distribution a tiny bit.