Thanks for joining me for the 17th issue of the Golden Stats Warrior, a newsletter for data-based insights about the Bay Area. If this is your first time reading, welcome! If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do that here. I am so grateful for your support.
Black Lives Matter. There are many great ways to support the movement to end police brutality against black people, but I would like to highlight one in particular: Pay for and read local journalism. Get a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle or the East Bay Times. Become a donor to KQED. Read the Oaklandside, Berkeleyside, Mission Local, and East Bay Express. All of the links in the previous sentences are to stories about police killings. These local news outlets hold elected officials and police departments to account, and we will need them well-resourced in the fights to come.
This week’s edition will be a little bit of a diversion. I want to talk about food.
Recently, I went to my favorite neighborhood cafe (shout out Fresh & Best 2) and ordered a BLT. What bread did I want? Dutch crunch of course. What other bread could compare, with its crackle and sweetness.
After I made my order, I had an epiphany. I don’t think I had ever had Dutch crunch before moving to the Bay Area. Was it a Bay Area-specific food?
Unsure of myself, I trawled the internet and asked some friends, and it seemed that Dutch crunch really was a specialty of the region—though people in the Netherlands and England eat something similar and call it Tiger bread. But how could I be sure? And what other foods are particular the Bay?
To figure that out, I turned to the website allmenus, which has menu data on hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the US. For my study, I collected menu data from the 500 most popular restaurants in 35 of the US’s biggest cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. (The definition of most popular is the restaurants whose web page on allmenus receive the most visits). Altogether, I collected over 17,000 menus, but eliminated chain restaurants that appeared in more than 4 states. This left a little less than 10,000 restaurants, 800 of which were in the Bay Area.
I then proceeded to look for the two-word pairings that were disproportionately likely to be found on the 800 in the Bay. The allmenus data include both the name of the item, and for some menus, a description of the ingredients. I only kept those pairings that showed up on at least 10 Bay Area menus.
Lo and behold, the two-word pairing most unusually likely to be found on Bay Area menus: “Dutch crunch.” I’ve never been so pleased with the results from crunching some data (pun intended!). Dutch crunch appears on 11 different menus in the Bay Area, but just one outside the region (even that one is in Sacramento). The full results are in the table below.
Many of the items on this list are Asian dishes or ingredients, like “walnut prawns,” “galangal kaffir” and “pumpkin curry.” These dishes come from a variety of Asian cuisines, which makes sense given the large and diverse Asian population in the area. There are also a few regional sushi rolls, like “torpedo roll.” If you were curious why “Lion King” shows up on the list, it’s because lion king rolls are offered at 17 different Bay Area restaurants, and hardly any outside the area.
Have you heard of “lake beans”? Neither had I. Apparently you can get them at a lot of Bay Area restaurants, including Oakland’s Bellanico as a side with your “Liberty Duck Leg Confit,” which also comes with yellow wax, toy box tomatoes and black venere rice.
I also looked for single words that show up more on Bay Area menus (listed below). Unsurprisingly, many of the top words are brands like “Trumer”, “Acme” and “Anchor.” I enjoyed that "levain” (related to sourdough), “fungus” and “chicories” showed up on the list.
Finally, since I had the data, I thought I would look for the most unusual two words in each major city. I don’t have much to say about it, but I hope this is enjoyable for the transplants. I am from the Washington DC area, and it makes complete sense that the “half smoke” is our most unusually common food.
Bay Area media recommendations of the week
There are two excellent stories I want to highlight this week.
In the Oaklandside, Ashley McBride wrote about the Black Organizing Project’s battle to get police out of Oakland schools. “Since 2011, the Black Organizing Project has been campaigning to eliminate police from OUSD, the only district in Alameda County with its own police force,” explains McBride. “The district spends more than $6 million each year employing school police and security officers.” A motion to get rid of three school police officers was recently voted down 4-3 by Oakland’s school board, but is likely to come up for vote again. The story clearly lays out how Oakland got here and why there is momentum for change.
As much as any group, the lives of restaurant and bar workers have been upended by the coronavirus. New York Times technology reporter Jack Nicas wrote about what’s happened to the staff of the great Oakland bar The Hatch over the last three months. It’s a devastating but important story.
(If you read or listened to something great about the Bay Area this week, please send it to me!)
Dan’s favorite things
This time of year I would normally be gearing up to attend San Francisco’s Stern Grove Festival. The free outdoor concert series is probably my favorite annual event in the Bay Area. The Stern Grove Festival Association puts on 10 shows every year, with acts ranging from the San Francisco Orchestra to indie rock star Mitski and reggae band Toots and the Maytals. What makes the concert series truly special is the setting. Shows take place in an amphitheater surrounded by giant cypress, pine and eucalyptus trees. Even if we can’t go to the shows this year, I suggest taking a trip the Grove just to see its beauty. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some impromptu concerts there this summer.
Thanks for your time, and see you in a couple weeks.
If you think a friend might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it along. You can follow me on Twitter at @dkopf or email me at dan.kopf@gmail.com
The Golden Stats Warrior logo was made by the great Jared Joiner, the best friend a nervous newsletter writer could have. Follow him @jnjoiner. Also, thanks to the brilliant Natalie Nava for copy editing this week.