The coronavirus pandemic has seen many people take on new cooking and baking projects, but they've also been relying on delivery to satisfy their urge to dine out. That's been the norm lately after many restaurants in Georgia and around the nation have pivoted to carry-out and delivery-only operations.
Although several restaurants have reopened dining rooms, many people are still relying on delivery. According to a recent Yelp report, Georgians have a favorite meal to order for home consumption.
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To determine what Georgia residents and people in the country’s other 49 states like having delivered the most, Yelp data scientist Samuel Hansen looked over dishes ordered since March 16, which was the date that shelter-in-place orders began across the country.
Hansen used a natural language processing technique called term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), which measures how often a dish is ordered in a state compared to its popularity in other states. Then, Hansen standardized the dish names and calculated the TF-IDF scores for each dish in each state to order to point out the top three dishes per state — the most regionally popular food-delivery items.
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Finally, Hansen named one of each state’s top three relatively popular items as the state’s singularly popular delivery item.
In Georgia, the most popular meal was wings. Unlike Utah where hot wings won out, the flavor that Peach State residents ordered most often went unspecified.
However, the state capital and metro Atlanta isn’t short on wing offerings. Last year’s Best of Atlanta poll saw more than 2,500 people weigh in on the best place to get some. Three Dollar Cafe, J.R. Crickets and Highlands Grill Kennesaw landed in third, second and first place respectively.
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Of course, fans of FX's "Atlanta" and residents of the series' namesake city will recognize Lemon Pepper Wet as a staple wing flavor, too.
