Food: my favorite dish. I could not resist, ahem, "Weighing" in on the issue of Texas breakfasts and who has the best.

The recent fracas between Austin and San Antonio over which town has the best breakfast tacos may be a mere verbal joust compared to the fighting words from a survey conducted by a home relocation website.

Estately.com, a site which claims to be "transforming the home buying experience," has taken data from the Yelp app and website - already accused of being an unreliable source of restaurant ratings and fake reviews -  released the results of a data crunch used in tracking Americans' preferences.

"Estately Real Estate Search set out to map the restaurant preferences of the 50 largest U.S. cities," according to the site. "Using data from Yelp, we scored each city from 0-300 on the abundance of 18 different restaurant types."

For example, according to Estately, the five best cities for breakfast enthusiasts  are...

City rankScore
1Oakland, CA213.0
2San Francisco, CA212.6
3Atlanta, GA183.4
4Minneapolis, MN172.7
5Mesa, AZ167.5

 

Yet for a city recently embroiled in such a controversy that they're willing to call out their closest large neighbor - even San Antonio native Carol Burnett weighed in while being honored by the Austin Film Society at SXSW -  the numbers do not look stellar for San Antonio.

 

5 worst cities for breakfast

 

In fact, both San Antonio and El Paso way out west were in the bottom five in the "Coffee" and "Donuts" categories, as well as the non-breakfast "Pizza" category. Meanwhile, in the Tex-Mex Category, Dallas, Fort Worth and, lo and behold, Austin make the top five (so do Atlanta and Washington DC, oddly enough.)

I give Estately points for creativity and grabbing headlines. I'd never heard of them until I read about this poll. Movoto has done stuff like this in the past. Yet I don't place much stock in lists like the Yelp/Estately crunch, not only . For example, Estately's data crunch ranks Austin low for Chinese Food, while I've had some tasty Chinese meals there. And the data omits my native Cajun cuisine entirely, so the data is woefully incomplete IMHO. I do know this much: the data on San Antonio could not have been highlighted at a worse time for a fighting for its reputation in the same categories.

The truth is, you can find good food all over this great nation of ours if you know where to look. My well-worn copy of Jane and Michael Stern's book Eat Your Way Across The U.S.A. has been at my side for years when motoring and traveling, giving way only recently to a Kindle edition of Roadfood, their newest food travel Bible. In recent years, the pair has operated website Roadfood.com which is a great stop to find regional favorites. I like the fact that this couple has made eating their vocation and it's that reason I trust their opinions. I don't know the reviewers on Yelp from Adam and they could be completely bogus for all anyone knows. They don't hit every establishment - come on, that's largely a physical impossibility especially since they appear to be in good health and aren't 800 pounds - but the ones they do review are done in detail.

Two takeaways:
1. Consider the source of the data.
2. Know before you go.

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