Italian Restaurants in Toronto & The GTA
Meesha Khan
Abstract:
This purpose of this research was to learn about the
clustering and locational patterns of Italian restaurants
in Tonroto and the Greater Toronto Area. We also
wanted to learn how authenticity, popularity and
affordability of these restaurants differed across the
many regions included in this study, as well as the
relationship between these three variables. We
hypothesized that regions with higher Italian Canadian
populations such as Etobicoke-Mississauga and
Vaughan as well as popular tourist sites would have the
most Italian restaurant. Another prediction we made
going into this research was that there would be a
positive relationship between authenticity and
popularity, and a negative relationship between
authenticity and affordability. According to our
research, these predictions were accurate.
Key words: Italian, Food, Restaurants, GTA,
Toronto, Authentic, Popularity, Affordability
Introduction
Our shared experience of living in a small town
heavily populated with Italian Canadians, is what
initially drew us to studying Italian restaurants in our
research. We were interested in learning the clustering
patterns of these restaurants and which regions in
Toronto and the GTA had the most restaurants. We also
wanted to understand how specific characteristics of
different regions, such as dominant population and
ethnic influence would affect the Italian restaurants in
said regions. We hypothesized that regions with a larger
Italian Canadian population would have the most Italian
restaurants. We also predicted that those regions would
have the most popular Italian restaurants. Lastly, we
hypothesized that authenticity would have a direct
relationship with popularity and an inverse relationship
with affordability.
Culture, Creativity, and Cities Capstone Course | Dept. of Sociology | University of Toronto – Scarborough
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4 Canada
Background
In order to better understand the reasons why Italian
restaurants locate in the places they do and why they
cluster in specific places, we drew upon information
from Patterson and Silver’s (2015) article “The place of
art: Local area characteristics and arts growth in
Canada.” We also used theories from Prayag, Landre
and Ryan’s (2008) article “Restaurant location in
Hamilton, New Zealand: clustering patterns from 1996
to 2008.”
Out of the five hypotheses that Patterson & Silver
(2015) identified, we found that two fit well in
describing the reasons for location and clustering of
Italian restaurants. In the case of art growth, (1) critical
mass theory stated that growth often occurred in places
with a prominent art scene (Patterson & Silver, 2015).
Similar to art growth, we hypothesized that the number
of Italian restaurants would be higher in places more
influenced by Italian culture.
Similarly, (2) perfect audience theory suggests that
Italian restaurants will be more popular and will be in
greater quantity in areas populated with people who will
consume it the most (Patterson & Silver, 2015).
Therefore, we hypothesize that Italian restaurants are
often located in tourist areas and places heavily
populated by Italian Canadians, as they are more likely
consume Italian cuisine.
One of the theories that Prayag, Landre and Ryan
(2008) mention in their article is central place theory
which describes how restaurants locate in area that are
heavily populated with specific demographics that can
support them economically. According to this theory,
Italian restaurants tend to locate in greater numbers near
or in regions more heavily populated with Italian
Canadians.
Methods
We began conducting our research by identifying as
many Italian restaurants as possible in Toronto and the
GTA using the Yelp website. This allowed us to
establish the regions we would study and divided the
locations of the restaurants into seven different
regions. We later divided these regions into two
subsets: “The Big Three” and “Fewer than Ten”, where
the regions in the former had more than 10 Italian
restaurants and the latter had less than 10. We
established a few rules when choosing the restaurants:
(1) could not be a mainstream chain or pizza restaurant
such as Pizza Pizza and Scaddabush. This was done for
the sake of authenticity, where the examples
mentioned above were not deemed to have authentic
Italian food by our standards.
Our second requirement was (2) that each
restaurant had to have a minimum of at least 10
reviews because this indicated that the restaurants were
somewhat popular. The next step was creating a code
sheet that would identify and analyze the main themes
and characteristics of the restaurants and their
locations. There were three variables chosen in our
coding analysis: (1) popularity, (2) affordability and
(3) authenticity. We coded popularity as the number of
written reviews each restaurant had on the Yelp
website. Affordability was determined by listing the
price of a specific dish (spaghetti or fettuccine) across
all restaurants, and the lower the prices, the more
affordable it was. Lastly, authenticity was coded by
language of the menu, where it was deemed authentic
if it was mostly written in Italian. The last step was to
analyze the codes on their own across regions and
identify the relationship between the codes.
Findings
Starting with the spatial analysis, we learned that
Downtown Toronto, Etobicoke-Mississauga and
Vaughan were the regions with the most Italian
restaurants and therefore we began to refer to them as
The Big Three throughout our study. Whereas,
Scarborough, Brampton, Markham and Richmond
Hill-Aurora had the fewest Italian restaurants with less
than 10. We referred to these regions as Less than Ten.
Our analysis of these two subsets revealed that the
average rating across restaurants located in The Big
Three regions were greater than those of Fewer than
Ten regions. The Big Three region with the lowest
average rating was Vaughan with 3.8 stars,
Culture, Creativity, and Cities Capstone Course | Dept. of Sociology | University of Toronto – Scarborough
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4 Canada
whereas Scarborough was the Fewer than Ten region
with the highest average rating of 3.75. This pattern
may have occurred due to specific characteristics of
the population or influence of each area. In the case of
The Big Three, they are either locations with
predominantly Italian Canadian population (Etobicoke-
Mississauga and Vaughan) or are a large tourist site.
Whereas, in the case of Fewer than Ten regions, they
are not tourist location and most of them have a
predominantly South Asian or Chinese Canadian
population. Therefore, The Big Three regions may
have more restaurants because restaurant owners may
feel more inclined to set up in areas with a large Italian
Canadian population that will dine in their restaurants.
Similarly, The Big Three regions have higher average
ratings because their Italian Canadian population may
place greater pressure on them to make more authentic
food, resulting in higher average ratings.
In the coding section of our research, we wanted to
understand how restaurants in each region fared in
terms of authenticity, popularity and affordability. We
also wanted to know the relationship between the three
variables. Firstly, our analysis revealed that Downtown
Toronto had the most number of popular restaurants
out of all the regions, with 10 restaurants above
average popularity and only 2 below average
popularity. Etobicoke-Mississauga region came in
second with 6 restaurants above average popularity.
However, it had the most number of restaurants that
were below average popularity, at 28. This suggests
that Etobicoke-Mississauga Italian restaurants are not
necessarily popular, however, there are a few that tend
to do well.
Another finding was that for authentic restaurants,
the average pricing was around $19 while restaurants
that are inauthentic priced around $16.65. This means
that authentic restaurants have higher prices than
inauthentic, suggesting that there is a inverse
relationship between the two variables. Similarly, our
data showed that inauthentic Italian restaurants had an
average level of popularity of 59 reviews and
restaurants classified as authentic had an average
popularity of 75. Therefore, authentic restaurants were
more popular than inauthentic ones, indicating that there
is a direct relationship between authenticity and
popularity.

Conclusion and Recommendation

Our analysis of Italian restaurants in Toronto and the
GTA demonstrates interesting trends and patterns about
how these restaurants are situated and the characteristics
they hold. Our research demonstrated that the majority of
Italian restaurants are clustered in Italian Canadian
regions and tourist sites. According to previous literature
done on clustering, this pattern may have occurred due to
the perfect audience, critical mass and central place
theories, which all suggest that a large Italian Canadian
population and strong Italian influence may sway owners
to set up shop in regions with those characteristics. Lastly,
we hypothesized that there that those same regions would
have the most popular restaurants and there would be a
direct relationship between authenticity and popularity
and an inverse one between authenticity and affordability.
Our research shows that all these predictions seem to be
accurate.

References
Patterson, Matt and Daniel Silver. (2015). “The place of
art: Local area characteristics and arts growth in Canada,
2001–2011.” Poetics 51:69–87.

Prayag, Girish, Martin Landré, and Chris Ryan. (2012).

“Restaurant location in Hamilton, New Zealand:
clustering patterns from 1996 to 2008.” International
Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
24(3):430–50.

Culture, Creativity, and Cities Capstone Course | Dept. of Sociology | University of Toronto – Scarborough
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4 Canada
Culture, Creativity, and Cities Capstone Course | Dept. of Sociology | University of Toronto – Scarborough
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4 Canada