OpenTable's 2026 Dining Trends Report: U.S. Dining +8%, 10× Per Month Planned

I read OpenTable’s two Tuesday-morning press drops back-to-back over a flat white at the desk, and the contrast did something to my pulse. The 2026 Dining Trends Report opens with the kind of number a CFO wants tattooed on the forecast: Americans say they plan to dine out ten times a month next year, and 55% plan to spend more on restaurants. U.S. dining is up 8% year-over-year in 2025. Forty minutes later, OpenTable dropped its 2025 Top 100 Restaurants in America, built from 10 million-plus verified reviews between September 1, 2024 and August 31, 2025. Chicago, somehow, took 16% of the honorees.

Here’s my contrarian read, and I’ll say it up front: the trends report is a stated-intent survey dressed in transaction-data clothing. The Top 100, by contrast, is the receipts. Both can be true at once, but only one of them tells you what’s actually going to happen in Q1.

Soo’s number is the most optimistic in hospitality this month

OpenTable CEO Debby Soo’s framing — that diners are “making room in their lives and budgets for dining out” — is a brave thing to put on a wire on the same week the QSR comp tape has been brutal and casual-dining traffic has been wobbling. To square those, you have to believe one of two things. Either the OpenTable network skews to the demographic still spending freely (plausible — it’s a reservations product, which selects for higher-intent occasions), or stated intent and actual swipe behavior are about to diverge in a way that gets ugly for anyone forecasting off survey decks alone.

The 8% YoY seated number is the more durable data point. That’s a real ledger. Ten visits a month is what diners say on November 18 of the prior year. I will eat my notebook if the realized average for 2026 clears nine. The directional signal — that committed restaurant-goers are leaning in, not pulling back — is the takeaway worth keeping. Operators reading this for capacity planning should index on the +8%, not the 10.

Chicago at 16% is the more interesting story

The Top 100 list is doing something quietly radical. Sixteen of the hundred honorees are in Chicago — a city OpenTable could just as easily have under-indexed in favor of the coasts. Built off ten million verified reviews across a twelve-month window, this is one of the cleanest demand-revealed lists in the category. It’s also the rare critic-adjacent ranking where the methodology is fully transparent: reservation-verified guests, scored at scale.

If you’re an operator, what you do with that list is more useful than what you do with the trends deck. The Top 100 is a recruiting and PR tool. It’s also a referendum on which cities are converting buzz into bookings. Chicago’s showing here is consistent with what I’ve heard from chefs working that corridor: the post-pandemic talent migration into the Midwest is not a vibe, it’s a roster.

What I’d watch next

Two things. First, whether the 55%-plan-to-spend-more figure holds when OpenTable refreshes it in Q1 — that’s the cohort where stated intent meets January’s credit-card statement. Second, whether the city-level distribution in the 2026 Top 100, when it lands a year from now, retains Chicago’s share or whether this is a one-cycle bump. My read: the 8% is the durable number; the 10× is aspirational; the Chicago figure is the headline that ages best.

A forthcoming May piece will look at how the OpenTable–Booking Holdings relationship shapes the data infrastructure underneath both of these reports — worth queuing up once you’ve digested today’s drops, because the methodology behind “10 million verified reviews” is itself a product strategy, not just a tally.

For now: print the +8%, archive the 10×, and book a table in Chicago.

— Hana edits the newsroom for TableTransfers. Tips: tips@tabletransfers.com.