"top 100 independent restaurants" news and stories

There's something about Vegas that makes people open their wallets -- and not just at the roulette wheel. According to the rankings of the top 100 independent restaurants by Restaurants and Institutions, the highest-grossing eatery in the nation is Tao Las Vegas Restaurant & Nightclub, which serves pan-Asian cuisine to Paris Hilton and common tourists alike.

The R&I list breaks it down so we can compare oranges to oranges. There's total sales, the size of the average dinner check, number of meals served, and seats per square footage. And when you look at the numbers, you can see that Tao Las Vegas isn't the top moneymaker by just a little. Its 2009 sales revenues are more than double its nearest competitor -- which, sadly, was the recently shuttered Tavern on the Green, despite the fact that the average dinner check at Tao was only five bucks higher than the Tavern's, and Tao actually seated only about a quarter the number of diners that the Tavern did. So far, the venerable Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach is hanging on at third place -- with numbers strikingly similar to the Tavern's.