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Houston has received major national stage love lately, and rightfully so, the city is home to some of the best restaurants around. So when OpenTable recently published the best restaurants in America, surely a number of Houston restaurants would be included among the online reservation site's prestigious 100, right? Wrong. Instead, Galveston's Rudy & Paco Restaurant, the only restaurant in the Houston-area, made the list according to Houston Business Journal.
It's not entirely OpenTable's fault, winners are selected by its members. The site collected feedback from diners who used its services between December 2013 and November 2014 and picked a winner from there. There's a number of variables involved, one being demographics. Diners who use and leave reviews on OpenTable are generally over the age 40, while younger and hipper diners are inclined to use Yelp (though the site did list Chama Gaúcha Brazilian Steakhouse as the only Houston representation on its 100 list earlier this year). Another contributing factor, not all restaurants use OpenTable. Oxheart, Coltivare and some of Houston's better restaurants don't use the service at all, instead opting to use their own reservation system or abandoning call-ahead arrangements altogether.
At the end of the day, are lists like OpenTable and other well-known and regarded publications relevant? It all depends, but at least OpenTable's best restaurants in Houston list offers a somewhat better representation of places to dine within the city limits.
