What Ingredients Make the Greatest Taco?

What is a good taco?

What is the wrapper, what is the filling,

and what are the toppings?

[Interviewer] So what did you do first?

I went and crawled restaurant menus

where they offer tacos, and looked

at what they actually offer in a taco,

and then we cross that with how people

describe their tacos when they review them online.

Chicken is the most popular meat by availability,

followed by beef, followed by fish.

So, we did a scatter-plot of popularity versus rating,

and found that the one in that optimal point,

where it is very popular but also really highly rated,

is actually fish tacos.

Where is the best fish taco?

It's not where, but what.

It turns out, you can get lots of different

types of fish in fish tacos.

The most common

were tilapia, mahi,

whitefish, grouper, and tuna.

Tilapia was the, the highest-rated

type of fish in a fish taco.

If you see a menu that lists fish tacos,

and says tilapia, you're in really good shape.

I see.

But, there's another attribute that matters a lot,

which is whether it's a soft tortilla or a hard shell,

and it turns out people much prefer

the soft tortillas to the hard shells.

Putting all these things together,

let's find some place where you can get

a really great taco that meets that criteria.

The conclusion is Ricky's Fish Tacos in Los Angeles.

When you're looking at hundreds of thousands of reviews,

things that are true of the entire population,

or the whole set of people will come through.

But, there are also ways to take

advantage of reviews as an individual,

so you can figure out the code that works for you.