Houston Tops Dallas for Dining, Says LivingSocial, But What's In a Survey?

I mean, look at this survey. What the hell does it even mean?

In the last two weeks, two very different surveys have been released on the dining scenes in cities across the nation: one from Travel + Leisure, which placed San Antonio above Austin on its top 20 list -- while failing to recognize any other Texas cities -- and one from LivingSocial, which named Houston and Dallas at the top of its pack.

The full results of each survey were even more curious.

Travel + Leisure's list didn't contain the usual suspects in its top three: New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles all fell farther down on the list, while New Orleans, San Francisco and Providence -- yes, the one in Rhode Island -- received first, second and third place respectively.

"The list was decided by Travel + Leisure readers, so it cannot possibly be incorrect," joked Paula Forbes of Eater Austin.

The LivingSocial list of the top ten foodie cities was also gleaned from its users' self-reported rankings of their own cities. And that list placed Houston at No. 4, right below New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Dallas came in at a shocking No. 5.

What do these two drastically different surveys tell us?

Slides courtesy of LivingSocial

We'll find out later that a lot of this - especially the "experimental eater" part - is hogwash. (Click to enlarge.)

Well, they tell us that surveys are silly and easily flawed, and that we shouldn't place too much emphasis on them one way or another. After all, these are just surveys of one magazine's readers, or of one website's users. But that doesn't mean the data the surveys contain isn't intriguing.

There was no "metadata" so to speak in Travel + Leisure's list, but there was plenty of interesting behind-the-scenes details to ponder when it came to LivingSocial, data culled from 4,000 of the site's users in 20 major cities. (Interestingly, New Orleans and Austin were not among the cities.)

The website, like Groupon or our own Voice Daily Deals site, allows its users to mass-purchase coupons for deals at area restaurants, bars, salons, yoga studios and more. But while LivingSocial has roughly half of the users that Groupon does -- 28 million versus Groupon's 70 million -- it's actually older than its biggest competitor, and it hasn't been faced with the controversies that Groupon has.

LivingSocial draws an entirely different demographic than Groupon does, too. A recent Nielsen survey showed that LivingSocial's typical user is in a much higher income bracket, much younger and -- like Groupon's core user -- mostly female.

That means that the typical LivingSocial user -- a young woman who makes good money -- thinks that Houston is pretty damn awesome. And they're the working single, too: LivingSocial's "rank by dining companions" showed that 11 percent of its Houston users were dining out while on dates while 12 percent of them were out with business colleagues. Those stats represent the third highest and the highest rankings in the nation, respectively.

But where are they eating?