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Chang’s Fig-Gate: Data Has the Final Word?

After all the recent flap over David Chang’s aside that “fuckin’ every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate,” we got to wondering if San Francisco really did have a fig problem. The data, as it turns out, show that San Francisco is hardly the worst offender when it comes to this practice — in fact, figs appear on more plates in New York than they do in San Francisco. A MenuPages “Find-A-Food” search for the word “figs” got just 12 hits in San Francisco — about 0.5 percent of city restaurants, while New York yielded 50, or about 0.58 percent. A San Francisco search for “fig” singular came up with 47 hits (about 2 percent), compared to 196 in New York (about 2.26 percent). So it would seem — at least from our cursory research — that it’s New York which actually more likely to be “just serving figs on a plate.”

Chang’s Fig-Gate: Data Has the Final Word?