A special online addendum to "The Best Food City in the West,".

We identified the West’s top dining cities by statistical means. To start, we selected a range of Western cities, then ranked them by quantity (the number of restaurants within their borders), diversity (up to 122 identified cuisines), and quality (the number of their eateries rated highly in AAA’s travel guides). Here are the details.

1. We first sorted the cities of the West by population, using current U.S. and Canadian census data. (Metropolitan region data were not used in our ranking.) The states and provinces included were California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado, Washington, Hawaii, and British Columbia. From this list we chose the seven cities with populations between 500,000 and 1 million: Denver, Las Vegas, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, and Vancouver, B.C. All are large enough to have a great variety of restaurants but small enough to be manageable for dining-oriented visitors. We consciously set aside Los Angeles and San Diego as constituting a separate region so large as to be worthy of separate consideration.

2. For each of the six cities, we found the total number of restaurants inside the city limits. Where possible, we gathered the most current data from local convention and visitors bureaus; in two instances (Las Vegas, San Jose) we were unable to acquire reliable data from city sources and instead used the Yellow Page listings available at Zagat.com. "Restaurants" are whatever each city said they are—typically, places that serve meals prepared on site.

SAN FRANCISCO – 5,369 restaurants are licensed in city as of 2007 (CVB data)
VANCOUVER, BC – 3,454 restaurants are licensed in city as of 2006 (CVB data)
PORTLAND – 2,889 in-city members and non-members of the Oregon Rest. Assoc.
SEATTLE – 2,627 restaurants are licensed in city as of 2007 (CVB data)
LAS VEGAS – 2,253 in yellow pages (Zagat.com)
DENVER – 2,000 restaurants are licensed in city as of 2007 (CVB data)
SAN JOSE – 1,622 in yellow pages (Zagat.com)

3. For each of the seven cities, we then consulted Zagat.com’s roster of restaurant "cuisines" in each city—from Afghan to Mediterranean to Vietnamese—to arrive at a ranking of the overall variety of national and regional cuisines represented.

SAN FRANCISCO – 122 cuisines are recognized
SEATTLE – 86 cuisines are recognized
LAS VEGAS – 84 cuisines are recognized
PORTLAND – 69 cuisines are recognized

4. For each of the seven cities, we used AAA TourBook guides and the searchable travel guides at AAA.com to arrive at the number of highly rated restaurants. We chose to eliminate all 1-diamond ("basic, good food") and 2-diamond ("relaxed family fare") places and to include only 3-diamond ("entry-level fine dining"), 4-diamond ("fine dining"), and 5-diamond ("world-class dining") places, thereby counting restaurants where the food is distinctive, creative, cutting edge, or exceptionally appealing in some other way. The TourBooks used were the Northern California & Nevada, the Oregon & Washington, and the Western Canada & Alaska, 2007 editions. Where printed and online totals differed, we chose the larger number.

SAN FRANCISCO – 140 (from book; 139 online)
LAS VEGAS – 139 (from book; 128 online)
SEATTLE – 85 (online; 80 in book)
PORTLAND – 64 (from book; 61 online)
VANCOUVER, BC – 48 (from book; 47 online)
DENVER – 39 (online; 18 in book)
SAN JOSE – 11 (online; 11 in book)

5. We set up a system to rank the cities by merging all three of the above criteria, giving each one equal weight. We used the highest number in each ranking as a base value against which the values for the other cities were compared, a method called indexing (see the formulas below). The highest values in all three cases (total restaurants, variety of cuisines, and diamonds) were in San Francisco, so its values became the base in each case. We then summed each city’s three index rankings and multiplied by 100 for an overall score.

Quantity score = no. of restaurants / no. of restaurants in SF x 100
Diversity score = no. of restaurant types / no. of restaurant types in SF x 100
Quality score = no. of 3+4+5 diamond places / no. of 3+4+5 diamond places in SF x 100
CITY’S OVERALL SCORE = quantity score + diversity score + quality score

SAN FRANCISCO 100 + 100 + 100 = 300
LAS VEGAS 52 + 69 + 99 = 220
SEATTLE 49 + 70 + 61 = 180
PORTLAND 54+ 52 + 46 = 152
VANCOUVER, BC 64 + 39 + 34 = 137
DENVER 39 + 52 + 28 = 119
SAN JOSE 30 + 39 + 8 = 77

6. This system led us to name Las Vegas, Seattle, and San Francisco the West’s three top dining cities—from a purely statistical point of view, of course. Which city is actually the most exciting place to eat? Click here to check out "The Best Food City in the West."