Calling all foodies! We mapped 10 of the most highly-rated restaurants in 25 U.S. cities known for their cuisine. From Atlanta to Washington D.C., check out the top 10 restaurants, their Yelp rankings, and the type of food that lands them on the map. We note the eight most common types of cuisine and more tasty trends, like the many vegan and vegetarian establishments and how food trucks are taking over the scene. Plus, we identify a steakhouse chain that is sure to be a highly-rated winner in three cities. We’ll also show you how easy it is to find the highly-rated steakhouse or other of restaurant nearest you.

View Best Restaurants in Major Foodie Cities in a full screen map

Fortunately, it doesn’t always cost an arm and a leg to eat out at a high-quality establishment. You can sort our map above by the price you’re willing to pay for dishes from Yelp’s highly-rated restaurants. Each dollar sign represents a range. There are 121 highly-rated restaurants on our map that Yelp classifies as “Inexpensive” ($) and 118 that are “Moderately expensive” ($$). Only eight of the highly-rated restaurants on our map are “Pricey” ($$$) and three of which Yelp deems “Ultra High-End” ($$$$.)

Common Cuisines

Popular types of food for highly-rated restaurants include:

• American food like burgers, hotdogs, and delis
• Coffee & Tea
• Mediterranean food like Greek, Lebanese, and Middle Eastern cuisine
• Italian food like pizza
• Vegan & Vegetarian
• Desserts & Bakeries
• Japanese food like sushi and poke
• Food trucks

However, there are many more types of food that highly-rated restaurants serve. Use the map to see them all, from the less common but equally yummy Vietnamese food to Asian Fusion, Armenian food, or a good Cuban meal.

Tasty Trends — Vegan, Vegetarian, & Highly-Rated Food Trucks on the Rise

Who said vegan and vegetarian food is subpar? There are many vegan and vegetarian places that make the list of highly-rated restaurants. Filter the map by vegan and vegetarian options to see for yourself the 21 plant-loving restaurants that beat out even the highest-rated omni-establishments.

Like vegan and vegetarian-centered restaurants, food trucks cooking up delicious and highly-rated food in the confines of small spaces are on the rise. Traditional brick and mortar restaurants in Austin, Texas are especially susceptible to being overtaken by top-tier food trucks. Eight out of Austin’s 10 most highly-rated restaurants are food trucks. The map can show you the rest of the highly-rated food trucks in the U.S. You’ll even find the additional information section includes the specific cuisine of each food truck.

What’s Cookin’ in Atlanta, Houston, and San Antonio?

If you’re planning a trip to Atlanta, Georgia, hit up Flat Shoals Avenue, for three of the best restaurants in the city. In addition to the three highly-rated restaurants on Flat Shoals Avenue, Atlanta is one of the three cities where Chama Gaucha Brazilian Steakhouse is highly-rated. This restaurant chain ranks #2 in Atlanta, and #4 and #7 in Houston and San Antonio, Texas, respectively. But before you stop on by the Brazilian Steakhouse in one of these major foodie cities, note that it will cost you some serious cash. Yelp classifies this chain as Pricey ($$$).

You can also visit a Chama Gaucha Brazilian Steakhouse in Chicago. However, Chicago must have many other more highly-rated options than Chama Gaucha seeing as it doesn’t make it into the top ten most highly-rated in the Windy City. In fact, when we tried to identify this chain’s rank in Chicago, we gave up after it didn’t appear in Chicago’s top 350 highly-rated restaurants.

Find the Highly-Rated Restaurant Nearest You

Now that you have access to a map of the most highly-rated restaurants like the Chama Gaucha Brazilian Steakhouse chain, it’s time to find the highly-rated restaurant nearest you. The search box in the top right corner of the map can guide you to your closest 4 or 5-star restaurant.

Just type your city, ZIP code, or full address into the search box and hit enter.

Even more useful, you can narrow your search by the specific type of food you want to try, or even by your ideal price range. Before you search with your location, utilize our grouping feature to filter the map. Then search for the highly-rated restaurant nearest you with those specifications. The results of your search will only include what you elected to show.

---

Want to get even more information about your city’s foodie hotspots? Make a map like ours, but include more than 10 of your city’s highly-rated restaurants. Then whip it out the next time you can’t decide where you want to eat.

It’s simple. Just copy 25 or 30 of Yelp’s restaurants in your area, like San Diego. Be sure to go to “All Filters” and sort by “Highest Rated.” Then, paste the data into a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets. While you’re at it, check out our popular post about advanced excel skills and formulas. Once you’ve gathered your city’s restaurant data, you can format your spreadsheet using headers like restaurant, rank, food type, and of course, the location! The final step is to simply copy and paste your easily formatted spreadsheet data into our location data mapper.

Volcanoes are hot right now — or at least some of them are. We mapped over 400 volcanoes from around the world as well as their eruption statuses. Some volcanoes have been erupting continuously for hundreds of years, a few volcanoes have recently cooled off, and there are those that haven’t exploded for some time now. Each volcano can be classified by type, and while stratovolcanoes are the most common, there are fourteen other types of volcanoes to get heated over. Don’t worry if you can’t name them all just yet. You’ll soon be able to name quite a few, and you’ll successfully identify the specific characteristics of stratovolcanoes, calderas, shield volcanoes, complex volcanoes, and more!

View Volcanoes in a full screen map

Before you have a meltdown from dying to know which volcanoes are hot and which are not, know that you can easily sort the map by eruption status, type of volcano, and even elevation. After you’ve sorted the map, read on as we break down the magma-tudinous facts about some of the hottest — and coolest — volcanoes.

Longest Currently Erupting Volcanoes

The volcanoes classified as erupting have exploded as recently as 2018, and many are continuously erupting to this day. This includes the longest continuously erupting volcano: Mount Yasur, a stratovolcano in Vanuatu. Mount Yasur has been erupting nearly continuously since 1774, and its eruptions can occur up to several times per hour!

While no other volcano can tout such long-standing continuous eruptions like Mount Yasur, there are several volcanoes that have been erupting around the clock since the early 20th century. Volcanoes like Santa María, Dukono, Sangay, Stromboli, Sakurajima, Semeru, and Shiveluch have continued to keep their lava flowing since as early as 1922. In the United States, Kīlauea, a shield volcano located in Hawaii, erupted continuously from January 3rd, 1983 until September 4th, 2018. In 2018 the eruption that began decades ago was officially over.

Where In The World Are They Erupting?

There are 42 currently erupting volcanoes on the map, six of which are located in Indonesia and four are in Ecuador. Japan, Papua New Guinea, and the United States are all home three erupting volcanoes. Much like the highest summits in the U.S., many of the U.S.’s currently erupting volcanoes are located in Alaska. However, unlike the summits, there aren’t 49. Two out of three U.S. volcanoes are located in the Last Frontier: Mount Cleveland and Mount Shishaldin. Costa Rica, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Russia, and Vanuatu each have to monitor two currently erupting volcanoes, while Antarctica, Colombia, France, India, the Lesser Sunda Islands, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom have one erupting volcano to watch out for.

Thirty-four of the erupting volcanoes can be classified as stratovolcanoes, while three are complex volcanoes, three are shield volcanoes, one is a pyroclastic cone and one is a cinder cone. The differences between the types of volcanoes are a blast to learn about, so keep reading.

Most Common Types of Volcanoes

Stratovolcanoes

Stratovolcanoes are built up of layers upon layers of lava and ash, and the word “strata” actually means layers. A stratovolcano’s lava typically doesn’t spread very far due to its thickness, so it’s good that they are the most common type of volcano. Two hundred and seventy-five out of the 419 volcanoes on the map are stratovolcanoes.

Calderas

Far less common than stratovolcanoes, calderas are huge and crater-like. They closely resemble a cauldron, which makes sense because in Portuguese, “caldera” means cauldron. You can find 40 caldera volcanoes on the map.

Shield Volcanoes

Pretty much the polar opposite of stratovolcanoes, shield volcanoes have fluid lava that can travel great distances. The liquidly lava also serves to give the shield volcano its flat shape, resembling a warrior’s shield on the ground — hence the name. There are 34 shield volcanoes on the map.

Complex Volcanoes

Last but not least for the most common types of volcanoes are complex — also called compound — volcanoes. Complex volcanoes consist of more than one peak, lake, or cone. There are 16 of these unusual-looking volcanoes on the map.

Other Types of Volcanoes

Other, less common types of volcanoes include volcanic field volcanoes, cinder cones, domes, fissure vents, pyroclastic cones, maar volcanoes, somma volcanoes, tuff ring volcanoes, plug volcanoes, and submarine volcanoes. Altogether, these 10 other types of volcanoes make up just over 12% of the world’s volcanoes.

No Elevation, No Problem: Submarine Volcanoes

Ten volcanoes on the map have negative elevations. You may be wondering how a volcano can erupt below sea level. Believe it or not, there is a specific type of volcano that manages to do just that. All but two of these under-the-sea volcanoes are submarine volcanoes, and while none of the submarine volcanoes on the map are currently erupting, they have successfully shot off steam at some point in their volcanic lives. One thing to note about submarine volcanoes: because they are surrounded by water, the volcano’s magma cools and solidifies quickly, sometimes forming super-cool volcanic glass.

---

As you can see from the map, there are a lava different types of volcanoes that have different eruption statuses. You can make a map similar to this one of your favorite mountains to hike or even the landmarks specific to your state.

Maps are a great way to visualize data, but they can never tell the full story. Whether it’s customers and prospects, houses for sale, or anything else that ends up in a spreadsheet, a map goes a long way to helping it make sense geographically. Once you’ve identified a single place on a map, it can be useful to go beyond the textual data from your spreadsheet. A well-placed image can give the location marker much more context.

They say an image is worth 1,000 words. In the case of the Infowindow (what Google Maps calls that popup box on top of a marker), there isn’t room for 1,000 words. An image, however, can help tell the story without taking up much space. BatchGeo makes it easy to create Google Maps from your spreadsheets and include images in the Infowindow.

Create and Resize Images

Before you can add images to your maps, you need to find or create the images to use. You don’t need any fancy photo editing software to do it. You likely have everything you need on your computer. Both Windows and Mac come with a photo viewing tools that have minimal editing features.

You’ll need some source images. You may have photos taken with your camera or perhaps you can find publicly-available, license-free images on Google. Either download them to your computer or navigate to where they are stored and follow these steps:

1. Double click one of the images to open in the viewer/editor application that comes with your computer. This should open up the file.
2. Locate the image resize option and select it. In Preview on a Mac, for example, go to the Tools menu and choose Adjust Size.
3. Set the width the 200 pixels and make sure to scale proportionally so the images doesn’t end up stretched out.

4. Save the file as a new name so you can distinguish this smaller version from the original.

You can repeat the steps for as many images as you need. If you have dozens or more of images, you can look for bulk image editors or resizing tools to save you some time.

Make Images Public on Dropbox

Now that you have image thumbnails, we’ll want to store them somewhere. In order to embed them in our map, they need to be available somewhere on the web. For that, you need a web server and not everyone has access or the ability to self-host their images. Thankfully, there are public cloud storage services that make this easy. Dropbox is one of the most popular. If you don’t already have an account, you can quickly create one for free.

Follow these simple steps to essentially turn Dropbox into a web server for your images:

1. Upload your images to Dropbox by moving a folder with your images into your Dropbox folder. You can also accomplish this through the web interface.
2. Right-click the first file in your folder and select Copy Dropbox Link. On Mac, you’ll need to hold the Control key while you click.
3. Paste the link into your spreadsheet or another location. Just make sure you have a way to remember which image goes with which link.

You’ll repeat that process until you have a link for each of the images. Each link will look something like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rndmchrctrs12345/filename.png?dl=0

There’s one more quick change to make your image available publicly in the same way as a web browser. You’ll need to perform a find and replace in your spreadsheet. Search for www.dropbox.com and replace it with dl.dropboxusercontent.com. In our example above, the image will now have a link like this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/rndmchrctrs12345/filename.png?dl=0

Now you’re ready to create or edit your map.

Add Image URLs to Your Map Data

Turning a spreadsheet into a beautiful web map is what BatchGeo does best. You can declare some columns in your spreadsheet as locations and some as data that you want to display. Your image column is neither of these. It will take the text, which should be a web address (such as Dropbox links) and embed the image within the marker box, called an Infowindow.

Let’s say you have a list of your customer names, locations, and links to a photo of each of them. You could store it in your spreadsheet like this:

Name	Address	City	State	Zip	Image
Caitlin Miller	219 W Channel Rd	Santa Monica	CA	90402	https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/mm1sdt66wh00b43/customer1.jpg?dl=0
Connie Dodson	445 Palisades Beach Rd	Santa Monica	CA	90402	https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/4yk4fcjmo6gegwq/customer3.jpg?dl=0
Ratliff Newton	250 Santa Monica Pier	Santa Monica	CA	90401	https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ejkeo1t21ruqofn/customer2.jpg?dl=0

Notice the Image column includes Dropbox links using the dl.dropboxusercontent.com version. When I copy-paste the entire contents of my spreadsheet, including headers, into this simple map-making tool, it automatically produces a map like this:

View Dropbox Image Map in a full screen map

Click around and you can see the small thumbnails of my customer photos. If the tool doesn’t automatically pick up your Image column, edit your map. Choose Validate and Set Options, then Show Advanced Options.

Make sure that the correct column is listed for Image URL.

Make Advanced Maps Without Writing Code

Customer images are just one example of an image embedded in a map—and a simple example of the power of BatchGeo. There’s a lot more you can do without becoming a programmer:

• Create a customer sales map
• Include charts in your map
• Explore density with heat maps overlays

There’s a lot more you can do to explore the stories in your geographic spreadsheet data. Create a map today!