New Study Suggests Kentucky’s Favorite Cuisine is … Mexican?

Kentuckians apparently love Mexican cuisine. Can we blame us? Wikimedia Commons/Missvain

If you blindly ask a Kentuckian what the most popular cuisine in Kentucky is, the answer you’d get is probably going to involve fried chicken or burgoo. You know, Southern fare.

But a new study by the price-monitoring website Pricelisto, based on Google searches, asserts that the most popular cuisine here is Mexican, with Kentuckians searching for various aspects of Mexican cuisine an average of more than 54,000 times every month.

The data examined the search volume for cuisine-related searches in each state over 12 months. Different combinations of search terms were used, and the results were then averaged over these months and then aggregated by each cuisine to determine, at least in theory, the most popular food in each state.

In Kentucky, it’s Mexican food, and it’s not even that close, according to the results of the Pricelisto study. Tacos, burritos, quesadillas and more are the way, apparently, in the Commonwealth. And when you think about the number of Tex-Mex restaurants and tacquerias in Louisville alone, it sort of makes sense.

Second on the list is Chinese cuisine, with just under 46,000 searches per month, followed in a distant third by Indian food at 20,284 searches. Italian fare ranked fourth with a little under 16,000 searches on average, followed by Thai food with slightly below 10,000.

“These insights show that there is a lot of conformity with what take-outs are being ordered and what restaurants people are visiting, especially as they are similar in most states,” per an unnamed Pricelisto spokesperson. “As the cost of living continues to rise, and visiting restaurants or having food delivered becomes more expensive, this data shows the cuisines that people will still be happy to spend money on.”

Am I the only one suddenly craving tacos?