Style-ing data

I guess the talk of the week has to be the "State of the Plate 2010" in Style Weekly this week. I generally agree with most of their picks and cant think of any glaring omissions. Like everyone, I have some dissenting and consenting views so blah....
(coincidentally, i wrote about a few of the out of town picks in this blog; so it was rather amusing as a personal note).
But I just wanted to look at the data presented statistically from a different angle and out of a general curiosity about the state of the plate and what it may say about RVA (the answer to which I dont know of course).

Looking at the lists from 2009 and comparing it to the one from 2010, it was rather interesting to observe:
2009 - 55 (primary) 'favorites' listed
2010 - 52 'favorites' listed
36 restaurants overlap both years. Of the others - 2009 set (19), 4 have closed in the last year.
2010 set (16), ~50% are relatively new (within the last year+) and ~50% have been around for a bit (and presumably made the list at some point in the past). These numbers are rather interesting and open to interpretation.

Number of restaurants from 2010 list on Opentable - 5 (under 10%) !!

State of the wallet: This was of great interest to me. Using some quickly acquired data from urbanspoon and Style, I found the following distribution. The y-axis represents the average cost of an entree. Within error (I think the numbers actually skew upwards), it was a rather expected trend.

The final thing which I dont have the time to research, but would have liked to know is the concept of local sourcing and generally supporting local farms, produce, livestock and/or sustainable fish and which restaurants win some points for being proactive in this regard. At some level, looking at all the data, I think the lack of this information is also telling.