Here’s my stab at the question: Feedback is heavily appreciated 🙂

Consideration after assumptions: Restaurants are any place where individuals can sit inside to dine in. This includes food courts, open table restaurants, but would not include food trucks or other street vendors which provide food. I am also performing this calculation for the state of new york and not new york city.

Estimation: Total number of individuals America: 330 Million: lets take 10% of that an attribute it to the entire state of New York: 10% = 33,000,000, rounded down to 30,000,000 people.

Lets now define an average restaurant: An average restaurant would house about 30-40 guests at a time.

Lets further break down the state of New York into 3 population groups.

Densely populated area’s of : 50% of the population.

Largely populated areas of New York would have 30 % of the population.

Sparsely populated areas of New York would have: 20% of the population.

That would give us: 15,000,000 individuals living in the densely populated areas of New York, 9 million people living in the largely populated areas of new york, and the remaining 6 million people staying in the sparely populated areas of New York.

I am going to make the assumption that  individual of personal preference, these individuals would choose to stay closer to the important hub’s of New York, due to its lower crime rate, faster response, and overall well being improvement by living closer to these populated areas.

When we think about the more densely populated areas of New York, we would imagine that to be places which are further away from high important economic sectors in New York, for instance financial hubs such as Wall St., and populated tourist area’s such as time square so, in this case we would have about 6 million people living nearby to those places. We can say that for these individuals living around this place, they have higher disposable income to spend, and therefore the total number of dine in restaurants we can accommodate that about 10% of these individuals would go to eat at a restaurant, which would accommodate to about 600,000 people.

If we have 600,000 people living in New York densely populated areas, then we have 600,000/40 approximating to 15,000 restaurants in densely populated areas, to accommodate for the demand

If we go to largely populated areas, we can assume that there is lesser disposable income to spend on restaurants, as they are living farther away from centres, and so there wouldn’t be as many restaurants to accommodate for demand. If we take 5% of  the 9M individuals at any given time to be able to spend money on restaurants. Which would give use 450,000 individuals who at any given time be able to spend money on restaurants.

Giving us a total of 450,000/40, about approximately, 13,000 restaurants.

Lastly for the most largely populated areas of new york, would be furthest from these financial hubs, and therefore have the least amount of disposable income, for this Lets assume that only  0.5% of the 15Million which is 75,000 people can spend money to go to sit in a restaurant at at given time, which gives us, 75,000/40 = approximately 2000 restaurants.

So if we total it out we have 2000 + 13,000 + 15,000 restaurants = approximately 30,000 restaurants in New York State.