Vienna, measured twice: about one percent both times

Vienna is the only city we measured in two independent ways. The two measurements know nothing about each other – and arrive at almost the same result.

Measurement one: the websites

In September 2026 we gathered every Viennese food business from OpenStreetMap’s open map data: 1,856 entries, from the corner Beisl to the fine-dining room. 1,345 of them have a reachable website of their own. For each we checked which languages it comes in.

15 of those 1,345 have a Chinese version. That’s a good one percent – almost exactly the figure we found in Frankfurt (14 of 1,055).

Measurement two: the platform itself

Three weeks later we read Rednote: the five searches Chinese-speaking travellers actually make before going out to eat in Vienna, fifty top-ranked posts per search, 189 distinct ones in total. In those we searched for the names of all 1,754 Viennese food businesses.

14 of 1,754 are named at all. That’s just under one percent.

	checked	hits	share
Website in Chinese	1,345	15	1.1 %
Named on Rednote	1,754	14	0.8 %

Two methods with nothing in common – one reads imprints, the other Chinese travel writing – and both land at roughly one in a hundred. That makes the finding more robust than either number alone.

Which fourteen restaurants those are, and what gets written about them, is in the Vienna city survey.

Where Vienna differs from Frankfurt

What’s interesting isn’t the share, but who belongs to it.

In Frankfurt they were Asian businesses without exception: Japanese restaurants, Chinese kitchens, a bubble tea shop. Not a single German, Italian or Greek place.

Vienna is different. Among the fifteen are the expected names – Chuan, Hong Kong Cafe, Chinatown, Taya Washoku Deli. But alongside them:

• the Griechenbeisl, one of the oldest inns in the city,
• Café Diglas im Schottenstift, a classic Viennese coffee house,
• Heindls Schmarren & Palatschinkenkuchl, Austrian pastry in its purest form,
• the Neubauschenke and the Atmosphere Rooftop Bar.

About half the Viennese hits are businesses that have nothing to do with Asian cuisine and everything to do with why guests come to Vienna in the first place. In Frankfurt that group doesn’t exist.

It’s a small but clear difference: in Vienna, classic hospitality has begun treating Chinese-speaking guests as a group of their own. Five businesses aren’t a movement – but they’re five more than in Frankfurt.

What the website number can and cannot do

It doesn’t measure whether a business gets found. Chinese travellers don’t search on individual restaurant websites, they search in the app; a translated page changes nothing about findability there.

The language version measures something that is harder to count: whether anyone in the house has dealt with this group of guests at all.

That’s exactly why the agreement between the two measurements is notable. It suggests that the one question – is anybody paying attention? – and the other – does the business appear? – have the same answer in practice.

On method

Business lists from OpenStreetMap, as of September 2026, and therefore incomplete: anyone not listed there is missing from our data too. The difference between 1,345 and 1,754 businesses checked comes from the language check only being able to cover businesses with a reachable website; the Rednote reading checks every name on the list.

The language check ran automatically over home page and, where present, imprint. Websites with an automatic translation widget – recognisable by offering ten or more languages at once – don’t count as a Chinese version. Among Viennese food businesses that affected exactly one hit.

The Rednote numbers are one day’s measurement: the platform’s ranking is personalised and changes. What we counted is that a name appears, not how it is judged.