By evaluating local restaurants’ romantic atmosphere, food and service ratings, and scraping thousands of reviews, Uswitch.com/mortgages calculated every capital’s ‘romance score’ out of 10 to determine the most romantic European city to live in.
The 10 best European cities for a romantic dinner
| 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 | Helsinki | 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 most romantic European city. 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), Parisian couples can expect a romantic atmosphere when going for their Valentine’s dinner, as 37.37% of restaurants in the city were considered romantic by reviewers.
More than half of Copenhagen’s restaurants are romantic
With a romance score of 9.7/10, Copenhagen earns the silver medal as Europe’s second most romantic city. In total, 53.09% of the Danish capital’s restaurants are ideal for couples, 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), Danish couples 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 to live in by seeking to evaluate the density and quality of romantic restaurants in major cities through the content analysis of 2.3 million restaurant reviews³.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
³Our sample of reviews was limited to a maximum of 250 of the most recent reviews per restaurant.
All Inclusive
Luksusowy kwartalnik turystyczno-podróżniczy. Od 2004 roku opisujemy miejsca, do których warto lecieć dłużej niż na weekend, i ludzi, którzy je prowadzą.
