These sorts of questions seem to be a thing on some websites and on google but I never really understood what it is about. I hope some folks here might enlighten me - namely:
1. What motivates this from a business perspective - does this activity have a name? 2. Are these questions asked by site visitors? 3. Since I am local do they guess I might know? 4. If I ask "Can I buy a lawnmower here" will someone get asked that? 5. Is the data collected useful?
As to what qualifies something as an American restaurant I have no idea.
They might ask for new information or that you validate an existing user contribution. It helps them a lot, you do free work. Be it Yelp, TripAdvisor or similar database that collect POI data (points of interest) or similar addresses, that's big business. There's only a few global databases like that in the world and they all have to kept up-to-date to compete with Google Maps. I say Google Maps because that's where most business owners add their own data immediately (and for free) while the same business owner won't update their profile in the other databases.
Foursquare charges $5 USD per 1000 API requests (https://foursquare.com/products/pricing/), Google $17.
As for the cuisine I can only point to the definitions OpenStreetMap uses https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:cuisine#Cuisine_(eth....) and what mappers really added to places around the world https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/cuisine#values
Abstract UX conversation: Q:"What are my nearby food options?" A:"Restaurants, Groceries, Coffee, Desert, or Bars?" (those are subcategories under Food&Drink). Q:"Yes, any of those. Please also include bakeries. And (especially in ethnic areas) convenience stores." A:"Which?" (but you can't search for Food&Drink). Q:"Any Food!" A:"Which?" Q:"Sigh". I've been "Wait, isn't there that nice cafe around here somewhere... I'm not seeing it under Restaurants... nor Coffee... nor a typed search for "cafe"... nor "food"... arg, ok, "bakery" finds it. Sigh.". So exploring food options requires manually integrating multiple searches. I'm puzzled.
Doesn't matter, but you and 19 other people will be asked that, and if the general consensus is yes, the tag 'American Food' will be added to the restaurant, and you've just been crowdsourced.