1 in 10 U.S. restaurants serve Mexican food, new study finds

Mexican food really is everywhere.

A new analysis by the Pew Research Center published Thursday found that 1 in 10 restaurants in the United States served Mexican food.

According to the report, which used data from third party vendor SafeGraph and restaurant review site Yelp, the ubiquity of Mexican restaurants is most pronounced in California and Texas. The two states account for about 40% of all restaurants serving Mexican food in the United States. When combined with Florida, New York and Illinois, these states account for about 51% of restaurants serving food in the county.

“Mexican food is American food at this point, and vice versa,” said Aaron Smith, director of data labs research at Pew. “Anywhere you have people in this country, you are bound to find a Mexican restaurant.”

According to the report, 85% of all U.S. counties had at least one restaurant serving Mexican food. In contrast, Pew found that other Latinx or Hispanic cuisines weren’t as prevalent; Only 29% of U.S. counties had restaurants that served Latinx cuisines other than Mexican. Nationally, these account for 2% of U.S. restaurants. Pew also found that 38% of Salvadoran and 25% of Honduran restaurants also offered Mexican food on their menus, whereas only 3% of Mexican restaurants served other Latinx cuisines.

Smith says Pew conducted this analysis after the response to a report the think tank put out last year that looked at the ubiquity of Asian restaurants in the United States. The study, which you can find here, found that roughly 12% of food establishments in this country served Asian food. Looking into Mexican restaurants was the obvious choice, he says, given that more than 35 million people in the United States trace their ancestry to Mexico. He also added that they included restaurants that served Tex-Mex in their analysis to be as inclusive as possible.

“We didn’t want to be the arbiters of what is and what isn’t authentic,” he said. “For our purposes, we wanted to encompass a broad scope of everything from restaurants with fairly Americanized menus with multiple locations to mom and pop operations that might not even have a listing on Yelp.”

At the county level, Los Angeles County easily takes the top spot with the most Mexican restaurants (5,484), more than doubling those of Harris County, Texas (2,362), which contains Houston. Rounding out the top 5 are San Diego County (1,712), Arizona’s Maricopa County (1,705) and Illinois’ Cook County (1,584), which includes Chicago.

The analysis also found that in 10 U.S. counties, Mexican restaurants accounted for more than a third of all food establishments in the area. Of these, eight were in Texas and seven of them were along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The glaring exception was Oregon’s Morrow County, east of Portland — 37% of restaurants in the area serve Mexican food.

That this sleepy county with a population of 12,000 residents has multiple Mexican restaurants isn’t that much of a surprise to Jaqueline Emmel, who runs marketing for Tacos Hometown, a food truck operated by her parents since 2013. Emmel points to the large Latino population next door in Umatilla County, which has a robust agricultural industry, as to why Mexican restaurants are abundant in the area.

And the top seller at Tacos Hometown? The quesabirria plate, which Emmel says her father added to the menu about two years ago, after coming across a social media video that highlighted the dish’s popularity in L.A.

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

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