Adding a bit of Geographic Diversity to the Restaurant Name Generator

Added in some establishments from Chicago, Denver, Larimer County Colorado, Portland and El Paso. Unique name count is now up to nearly 70000 entries. I still need to purge the DB of what I find less than useful but its far better than what it once was.

Time to Eat: Random Restaurant Names

I’ve been trolling around for real business names for some time. Databases of actual business are available at crazy prices but I do one level for this hobby — zero cost. Thanks to data.gov I stumbled across a list of NY establishments — those inspected by the state. The data was a mess. Upper and lower case words, oddball combinations of words, strange abbreviations, and other curious combinations so I spent a fair amount of time cleaning it up. I also stripped out nearly 15000 entries related to schools or repetitious entries. More time at fixing the data could be spent but I wanted to roll out the full system before tweaking and tuning even further.

The resulting generator is the Random Restaurant/Eatery Generator.

I’d really like to merge some of the results with the Street Name and City Name Generators to expand the field exponentially. Until then, it will remain a whole lot of NY style names (both state and city). I like it thus far even if the data cleanup is incomplete.