Chips, Curry or Kebab? The United Kingdom's Takeaways and Restaurants by Name, per Head and by Place

The Food Standards Agency publishes every inspected food business in the United Kingdom as open data, with its name, business type, postcode and hygiene rating, but not what food it sells. I retrieved all 614,680 establishments on 2026-10-28, including 62,949 takeaways and sandwich shops and 141,306 restaurants, cafes and canteens, and sorted their trading names into sixteen kinds of food with transparent keyword rules. The rules gave a kind of food to 65.0% of takeaways. In a held-out random sample of 300 names, each labelled individually by reading the name, 96.7% of the rules' answers were right (95% interval 93.0 to 98.5%), and where 21,351 matched OpenStreetMap places carried a cuisine tag the two agreed 91.7% of the time. Counted against Census populations of postcode districts and mid-2025 estimates for counties and unitary authorities, the maps are distinct. Chip shops are densest in seaside resorts (Skegness, 129.6 per 100,000 residents) and, among larger council areas, in Blackpool (34.1); Indian restaurants and takeaways in Hounslow and Southall; Chinese places in the old Chinatowns of Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; kebabs in north London; chicken shops in inner London. Wales has the most chip shops per head, Scotland the most takeaways and curry houses, Northern Ireland the most pizza places. Takeaways outnumber restaurants in only 4 council areas of 100,000 or more. Takeaways rate lower for hygiene than restaurants, and chain takeaways higher than independents. Every count is a floor, because a third of takeaways have names that do not say what they sell. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/takeaways/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/takeaways. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/takeaways/.