Findings:
After a several month-long process, our team found that less than 2% of DC restaurants (48 restaurants total) serve foie gras.
Overview and Methodology:
From October to December 2025, we reviewed digital menus of every restaurant in DC searching for ‘foie gras’, a controversial ingredient made by force-feeding ducks and geese until their liver becomes fatty and diseased.
To find the percentage of restaurants that sell foie gras in the District, we used the following equation:
Known DC restaurants that sell foie gras /
The total number of DC restaurants (source) =
Percentage of DC restaurants that sell foie gras
Known DC restaurants that had foie gras listed on their regular, seasonal, or holiday menu at the end of 2025: 48
The total number of DC restaurants as of February 2026: 2,661
Percentage of DC restaurants that sell foie gras: 1.8%
Ensuring Accuracy:
Every business on this list went through two checks before it counted: an automated pass, then a manual review by a person.
The starting point was a list of business names pulled from Google Maps across DC using Google Street Maps and Overpass Turbo that met 3 criteria: is the business in DC, does it serve food to the public, and is it still open. Pro-Animal DC led this research over a two month period around the holidays, the most popular time of year for foie gras sales (research conducted in late 2025).
An LLM was used to crawl websites of every restaurant in DC searching for the phrase ‘foie gras’. A “Yes” required the menu to say “foie gras” directly; anything unclear was marked “Maybe” rather than guessed.
Each business’s own website or menu was checked first, then reliable secondary sources like social media pages, Yelp, Toast, and Google reviews.
Every ‘Yes’ or ‘Maybe’ was then manually checked by someone from our team, confirming the dish, the price, and whether it was seasonal or not. Each confirmed entry was date-stamped, so it can be re-checked later again down the line.