2008 San Francisco Michelin Star Restaurants in Google Earth
Here is a map I created. Do let me know what you think of it, won’t you? I’d like to know how to improve it (include more information, change formatting, etc.). Also, I’d like suggestions for what other food related maps would be useful or interesting.

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I’m really into Google Earth. I don’t really know why. I like maps, like the one I made of cookbook stores back in April. And one of my first posts on this blog was about the exhibit of culinary maps at the Michigan Map Library. But this project of mapping the Michelin Star Restaurants in San Francisco has me obsessed with Google Earth for about a month now. I love that it’s free. I love that there’s a huge amount of user generated content. I love that creating content can be really simple and intuitive, or extremely customized.

Putting together the content for my map was fun and labor intensive. I got the list of restaurants from the Michelin Guide website. I think I looked up the addresses manually, then used Batch Geocode to get the latitude and longitude of each location. I searched Flickr for creative commons licensed images from the restaurants. Then I fed all of this information into the Google Spreadsheet Mapper template.

Perhaps you’ll enjoy the Mapping episode of This American Life. I did. Acts one and five are spectacular. Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold describes his taste map of Pico Boulevard.

Also, during Jan Longone’s presentation on her exhibit The Old Girl Network: charity cookbooks and the empowerment of women, she showed a map of the charity cookbooks from Michigan. It’s a great presentation, and you can stream the whole thing [link].