Word Salad: Relating Food Prices and Descriptions

We investigate the use of language in food writing, specifically on restaurant menus and in customer reviews. Our approach is to build predictive models of concrete external variables, such as restaurant menu prices. We make use of a dataset of menus and customer reviews for thousands of restaurants in several U.S. cities. By focusing on prediction tasks and doing our analysis at scale, our methodology allows quantitative, objective measurements of the words and phrases used to describe food in restaurants. We also explore interactions in language use between menu prices and sentiment as expressed in user reviews.