Chinese restaurants are part of life across Europe. But are there differences across the continent in terms of their numbers and popularity? We looked at the TripAdvisor customer review website to find out…

The cities in Europe with the most Chinese restaurants featuring on TripAdvisor are London, with 763 listed, followed by the French capital Paris, with 562.

At the other end of the scale, Iceland's capital of Reykjavik has just eight Chinese restaurants listed on TripAdvisor, while the Croatian capital Sarajevo has only six places to choose from for Chinese food. But, given the variation in the size of the cities, that might not be an entirely fair comparison.

So, how about trying to judge where, among European capital cities, Chinese restaurants are highest rated?

To calculate this, we looked at just the top 50 percent of a city's restaurants, judged by their ratings, and then looked at the number of Chinese restaurants that made the grade. This allowed us to work out what proportion of the higher-rated restaurants were Chinese.

Taking Rome as an example, there are 10,630 restaurants, of which 308 are Chinese. Among the 5,315 top-rated restaurants (the top 50 percent) 171 of them are Chinese. That allows us to work out that one in 31 of the higher-rated restaurants in Rome is Chinese.

This method of measuring popularity provides a completely different set of results, with Austria's Vienna topping the polls. There, one in 21 of the better-ranked restaurants is Chinese, followed by Sweden's Stockholm, Switzerland's Bern and Finland's Helsinki, where the figure is 27.

At the other end of this scale – at the time we carried out the survey in July – is Reykjavik, with one in 172 of the higher-ranked restaurants being Chinese. The figure for Turkey's Ankara is one in 140 and in Bulgaria's Sofia it is one in 103.

Of course, there are a few things to remember about what is an unscientific poll. Firstly, that it is based on customer reviews on TripAdvisor, so it might just be that people who use TripAdvisor in a particular city are particularly keen on – or not fans of – Chinese food.

We also looked at the menus of mid-ranked Chinese restaurants in each city to try to compare the price charged for the popular Chinese restaurant dish of sweet and sour pork.

But whatever the results, with more than 3,000 Chinese restaurants in the capital cities of Europe alone, plus many, many thousands more across other cities, towns and villages, the continent's enduring appetite for Chinese cuisine continues.