Here at RJMetrics we build software to help our clients make data-driven decisions. Sometimes, we get the itch to peek at data from other companies to learn a little bit about how they work. Earlier this year we turned our sights to OpenTable.com, the online restaurant reservation system, and discovered that these restaurants are home to the most sought-after tables in San Francisco:
- Flour + Water
- Spruce
- Frances
- Cotogna
- nopa
- Slanted Door
- Wayfare Tavern
- Benu
- Commonwealth
- Quince
As a group, these ten restaurants have received 7 Michelin Stars and 33 OpenTable Diner’s Choice Awards. All are Zagat rated. On the whole, however, this list does not represent the city’s most expensive dining options. Six of these restaurants are in OpenTable’s second-most affordable category, with meals averaging below $30 per person.
We checked several times per day, and, for many of these restaurants, found fewer than ten different reservation slots open during our 34-day sampling period – and those were quickly snatched up. For comparison, of the 461 different restaurants that we checked, the majority had over 220 different reservation slots open at some point during our sampling period.
The results here are unlike what we found in our analysis of New York City – San Francisco’s most popular restaurants are not necessarily the most expensive. But getting a seat at one of these tables can be difficult. The demand for good, affordable dining is so high that our friends over at PrimaTable.com created tools to help diners find open reservations at these and other highly sought-after restaurants.
How did we generate this list?
For every dinner reservation on the half-hours between 6pm and 9pm from January 3rd to February 17th 2012, we checked OpenTable every six hours starting two weeks before the reservation. We ignored Sunday and Monday because many restaurants are closed or do not take reservations on these days.
