Report: 99 percent of U.S. residents have a Mexican restaurant in their county

All but four million residents of the United States can go to a Mexican restaurant without crossing any borders: national, state or county.

A new analysis by the Pew Research Center shows how prevalent and accessible Mexican food has become in the United States.

In all, 11 percent of restaurants in the country serve Mexican fare, and 85 percent of U.S. counties have at least one Mexican restaurant.

The remaining 15 percent of counties are sparsely populated, accounting for the four million U.S. residents who have to change jurisdictions to get their taco fix.

Pew conducted its analysis based on data from SafeGraph, a global location data curator, restaurant review website Yelp, and county-level population estimates from the American Community Survey.

For the analysis, Pew counted 788,018 restaurants operating nationwide, based on SafeGraph's data as of March 23, 2023.

Of the more than 80,000 restaurants serving Mexican food, 51 percent are in California, Texas, Illinois, New York and Florida.

Mexican food is overrepresented in Hispanic cuisine offerings. Though people of Mexican origin account for 60 percent of the country's Latinos, only 2 percent of U.S. restaurants serve food with Western Hemisphere (or Spanish) origins beyond Mexico.

Pew analyzed data for Caribbean, Cuban, “Latin American,” Peruvian, Salvadoran and Spanish restaurants, most of which are concentrated in areas with diasporas from those countries.

For instance, the three counties with the highest share of Cuban restaurants were all in Florida, and the highest share of Salvadoran restaurants are concentrated in the Washington, DC suburbs.

Mexican restaurants, though prevalent nationwide, are more common in the Southwest.

California and Texas, the states with the largest Hispanic and specifically Mexican-American populations, offer the most diversity in Mexican restaurants.

California hosts 22 percent of all Mexican restaurants in the country, and Texas has 17 percent.

Los Angeles County alone has 5,484 eateries offering Mexican food.

In Ochiltree County, Texas, a panhandle jurisdiction with about 11,000 inhabitants, 42 percent of all local food vendors sell Mexican food. 

By state, New Mexico has the highest prevalence of Mexican chow – 22 percent of the state's restaurants serve Mexican, same as 20 percent of Texas restaurants, 18 percent of restaurants in Arizona, and 17 percent of restaurants in California.

The 99 percent of U.S. residents with in-county access to Mexican food can also count on good prices. Pew found that only 251 Mexican restaurants nationwide are listed on Yelp with three or four "dollar signs," while 61 percent were listed with one dollar sign.

Pew’s research did not delve into the authenticity of the Mexican food, rather on tags in the datasets from SafeGraph and Yelp. Restaurants with tags like “Tex-Mex” or “tacos” were included in the Mexican category, while tags pointing to broader origins like “empanadas” were categorized in Latin American food.

In May, Pew conducted a similar analysis of Asian restaurants in the United States, which found 71 percent of those restaurants claimed to serve either Chinese, Japanese or Thai food.