Affected by factors such as the city’s functional orientation and tourism consumption, the spatial layout of the catering industry in a tourism city has its own distinctive characteristics. The spatial distribution characteristics of the catering industry and the factors impacting it (from the perspectives of transportation, tourism resources and population) in the main city area of Lhasa, Tibet were analysed through point of interest data mining, average nearest neighbour analysis, a standard deviational ellipse, kernel density estimation, and buffer analysis in ArcGIS software. As a result, the spatial distribution pattern showed catering providers are mainly aggregated in the vicinity of areas with either developed transportation or rich tourism resources. The resident population has an important but inconclusive influence on the distribution, while the distribution of its concentration is highly consistent with that of the instant population. Considering the spatial structure, functional orientation, and tourism development of the area, measures are proposed for optimizing the spatial layout of the catering industry in this tourism-heavy plateau city.