Mapping elite tastes along New York City’s gourmet gentrification frontier, 1990–2015

Urban researchers have long considered the spread of upscale amenities like restaurants, cafes and bars to be important symbolic indicators of gentrification, and recent scholarship has shown that increases in upscale consumption amenities are positively associated with rising rents and demographic changes. This article builds on research in urban and economic geography to consider the role of changing informational networks about consumption businesses. Using a novel dataset assembled from print Zagat Survey guidebooks, the first crowdsourced restaurant guide and the direct antecedent of contemporary local review platforms like Yelp and Google Maps, this article traces the contours of ‘gourmet gentrification’ in New York City using quantitative and spatial analysis from 1990 to 2015. The visibility and desirability of specific restaurants and neighbourhoods has changed significantly over several decades for Zagat’s largely affluent professional audience of surveyor-readers. Neighbourhoods in northern Brooklyn in particular saw precipitous increases in listing density over this time period. In addition to mapping these spatial trends, the article compares the Survey’s recorded meal prices to household income data from the Census, showing the shifting affordability of Zagat-listed restaurants to area residents at the Neighbourhood Tabulation Area (NTA) level over time. In the New York City case, gourmet restaurants are a leading, not lagging, indicator of demographic change. Zagat listings on the edge of the ‘gourmet gentrification frontier’ tend to initially be unaffordable to area residents, but over time this trend is muted as the residential population of these areas becomes wealthier and the frontier moves outward.