A few weeks ago, we ran reviews for a Michelin-reviewed restaurant through our Natural Language API. It was able to tell us what people liked or disliked about the restaurant, and even rank dishes by sentiment. In our analysis, we also noticed something curious. When our NL API pulled out the entity “Covid-19,” it wasn’t always paired with a negative sentiment.
When we mined back in to where these positive mentions of Covid-19 occurred in the reviews, we saw that our NL API appeared to be picking up on language in which restaurant reviewers felt a restaurant had handled Covid-19 well. In other words, when Covid-19 was determined to be part of a positive statement, it was because guests felt relatively safe. Or that the restaurant had come up with novel solutions for dealing with Covid-19.
With this in mind, we set to starting up another, larger analysis.
To commemorate the most recent re-opening of restaurants in San Francisco, we started by extracting all 320+ open (or soon to be open) outdoor dining locations listed in FunCheap SF’s awesome guide.
Using Diffbot’s Crawlbot, we crawled review pages for all of these food establishments and set up a Custom Extraction API to pull out all reviews that mentioned some permutation of or reference to the word “Covid.” We then passed all these to our Natural Language API. This API parses natural language to pull out entities, relationships between entities, sentiment of entities, and salience (how central an entity is to understanding the meaning).
After averaging the sentiment of every Covid-19 mention in our reviews (some 2,000+), the following locations fared the best.
Note: Sentiment scores range from -1 (very negative) to 1 (very positive). In other natural language documents like news mentions, we’ve seen Covid return sentiment from -3 to -8. All of these restaurants had Covid-19 mention sentiment higher than .3. Always do your own research and use your own judgement as to what environments are handling Covid well. This is primarily an exercise in applying NLP to unstructured review data.
25. Palm House
Marina
2032 Union St
24. Park Tavern
Telegraph Hill
1652 Stockton St
23. 25 Lusk
SoMa
25 Lusk St
22. Causwells
Mission Dist.
2346 Chestnut St
21. Piperade
Embarcadero
1015 Battery St
20. Curio
Mission Dist.
775 Valencia St
19. The Seven Stills Brewery and Distillery
Mission Bay
100 Hooper St Ste. 4
18. Lost Resort
Mission Dist.
2736 20th St
17. We Be Sushi
Mission Dist.
538 Valencia St
16. Pearl
Outer Richmond
6101 California St
15. The Progress
Fillmore Dist.
1525 Fillmore St
14. Cafe Boho
Marina
3321 Steiner St
13. Torraku Ramen
Potrero Hill
300 De Haro St Suite #338
12. Casements
Mission Dist.
2351 Mission St
11. Cocotte
Nob Hill
1521 Hyde St
10. Monsieur Benjamin
Hayes Valley
451 Gough St
9. Lovejoy’s Tea Room
Noe Valley
1351 Church St
8. Kahnfections
Mission Dist.
3321 20th St
7. Palio
Financial District
640 Sacramento St
6. Frascati
Russian Hill
1901 Hyde St
5. Bonita Taquiria y Rotisserie
3600 16th St
4. State Bird Provisions
Fillmore Dist.
1529 Fillmore St
3. The Monk’s Kettle
Mission Dist.
3141 16th St
2. The Morris
Potrero Hill
2501 Mariposa St
1. The Patio
Marina
3232 Scott St
See a mistake? Reach out and we’ll fix it! While we have relied on multiple sources for data about whether a given restaurant is open, plans to open soon, and offers outdoor dining, many restaurants are in flux.