If you’re still looking for the perfect restaurant to accommodate a romantic Valentine’s dinner with your sweetheart, OpenTable Inc. might have a few suggestions.
The San Francisco, Calif.-based online restaurant-reservation service recently released a list of what it called Canada’s 100 “most romantic” restaurants, ranked based on the percentage of reviews citing “romantic” as a special feature.
In a Feb. 1 statement, OpenTable Canada’s head of national accounts, Ziv Schierau, praised the restaurants on the list for boasting “intimate atmospheres, specially curated menus and exceptional hospitality,” calling them “excellent choices for places to dine on one of the most romantic and busiest days of the year.”
The restaurants span eight of Canada’s 10 provinces, though more are located in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec than elsewhere, and are less international in scope than you might think: the majority serve fare that is Canadian or European in origin, while only one is Middle Eastern, and none are Asian.
To build the list, OpenTable analyzed over 480,000 online reviews of more than 1,900 restaurants across the country, considering all restaurants with a minimum number of qualifying reviews and overall score, though it did not state what either minimum was.
The qualifying restaurants were then given scores and sorted based on the percentage of reviews citing “romantic” as a special feature.
Of the nine provinces on the list, Ontario is home to the greatest number of restaurants – 46, including multiple-location franchise the Keg Steakhouse. In second place is Alberta with 27, followed by Québec and British Columbia with 12 each, Nova Scotia with four, and Manitoba with three. Saskatchewan (Saskatoon’s Little Grouse on the Prairie) and Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s Raymonds) are each represented by one, while New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, sadly, did not have any establishments on the list (though New Brunswick, at least, has a Keg).
In addition to the list, OpenTable released a series of findings based on Canadian Valentine’s Day reservations made through its app last year, including the rising number of mobile bookings – 42 per cent of last year’s Valentine’s Day in Canada were booked using mobile devices, an eight per cent increase over 2014 – and the fact that 45 per cent of Canadian diners waited until the week before Valentine’s Day to make their reservations.
If you’re among those diners still waiting until the last minute, you can check out the full list of Canada’s 100 most romantic restaurants here.