Die besten europäischen Städte für ein erstes Date

Curious to find out, Uswitch.com/mortgages/ analysed local food and service ratings, while also scraping thousands of restaurant reviews from across Europe to identify those that included romantic terminology, and determine the best European cities for a romantic first date. 

The 10 Best Cities for a First Date

Rank

City

Country

Romantic Atmosphere % [1]

Romantic Restaurants % [2]

Romance Score/10

1

Paris

France

35.47%

37.37%

10

2

Copenhagen

Denmark

20.37%

53.09%

9.7

3

Berlin

Germany

19.96%

51.91%

9.5

4

Helinski

Finland

31.7%

29.31%

9.2

5

Rome

Italy

24.25%

33.83%

9.0

6

Athens

Greece

19.58%

37.84%

8.9

7

Amsterdam

The Netherlands

14.98%

48.65%

8.1

=8

Zagreb

Croatia

18.59%

41.06%

7.9

=8

Stockholm

Sweden

16.37%

43.61%

7.9

10

Riga

Latvia

20.37%

18.47%

7.8

Earning its title of The City of Love, Paris claims the top position as the best European city for a first date. With a perfect 10/10 score, the restaurants of the French capital are considered to have a romantic atmosphere by 35.47% of guests—3.77% more than Helsinki (Finland), which takes second place in this regard. Even though Paris is ranked 16th for its average food rating (3.44) and 12th for average service (3.52), potential Parisian couples can expect a romantic atmosphere when going for their first date, as 37.37% of restaurants in the city were considered romantic by reviewers.

More than half of Copenhagen’s restaurants are ideal for a first date

With a romance score of 9.7/10, Copenhagen earns the silver medal as Europe’s second best city for a romantic first date. In total, 53.09% of the Danish capital’s restaurants are ideal for intimacy, the highest percentage in Europe, and 9.48% more than its neighbours in Sweden with 43.61%. Despite Copenhagen placing in the bottom 10 for both food ratings (3.08) and service ratings (3.1), possible Danish can be spoiled with a romantic atmosphere during dinner as the capital scored 20.37% for the category.

Berlin is the third most romantic European capital

Germany’s capital city, Berlin, holds third place with a romance score of 9.5/10. Despite placing 23rd and 22nd for average food rating (3.3) and service rating (3.27) respectively, 51.91% of the city’s restaurants are consistently described as romantic by reviewers—0.81% more than Madrid with 51.1%.

Methodology

  1. Uswitch.com/mortgages sought to uncover the most romantic European cities for a first date by seeking to evaluate the density and quality of romantic restaurants in major cities through the content analysis of 2.3 million restaurant reviews [3].

  2. A full-text search for keywords synonymous with “romantic” (such as “romantic”, “beautiful”, “lovely”, “cosy”, “cute”, “charming”) was performed on all reviews or each restaurant within the sample and was labelled as romantic if a matching text was found. Keywords were translated into relevant languages where appropriate.

  3. Restaurants were labelled as being romantic based on the criteria of having at minimum, 10 % of their reviews mentioning romantic keywords. This allows us to limit our sample of restaurants to those with a notoriety for a romantic atmosphere.

  4. Restaurants were subsequently reverse-geocoded using city level boundary lines from the Database of Global Administrative Areas and NaturalEarthData.com to identify all restaurants within our sample by city.

  5. Capital cities were ranked using a normalised weighted score considering the average food and service ratings along with the percentage of romantic restaurants in the city and the percentage of romantic reviews in the city. A higher weight was given to the latter two variables.

  6. Reviews were collected between October 2021 and January 2022.

1.) Romantic atmosphere %’ is the percentage of all reviews that contained a romantic keyword.

2.) Romantic restaurants %’ is the percentage of restaurants that had 10% or more of its reviews using a romantic keyword.

3.) Our sample of reviews was limited to a maximum of 250 of the most recent reviews per restaurant.

Credit: https://www.uswitch.com/mortgages