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" Aspiring food bloggers take note: It&amp;#039;s OK to photograph your meal at that spiffy new restaurant but please refrain from getting on the phone to talk or text about it while you&amp;#039;re there. Those are just a few of the facts to come out of Zagat&amp;#039;s latest survey of restaurants. The annual review is a survey of 153,000 &amp;quot;avid diners&amp;quot; and ratings and reviews of the 1,552 top restaurants throughout the country.  Apparently, about 63-percent of those polled said talking and texting at the dining table is &amp;quot;rude and inappropriate&amp;quot; while 33-percent felt it was all right in moderation. Only 2-percent felt it was &amp;quot;perfectly acceptable&amp;quot;. A request to our waiter: please don&amp;#039;t sit us near that 2-percent.  Curiously, there seemed to be an almost inverse relationship between tipping and the cost of the meal \u2013 in New Orleans, at any rate. Big Easy residents pay the lowest average cost per meal when dining out - $28.36 compared to the national average of $35.37 \u2013 but tip the most \u2013 19.7-percent as opposed to the national average of 19.2-percent. Westerners were the worst of the lot: Hawaiians, and residents of San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento, Calif., all tipped an average of less than 19-percent. New Yorkers, too, who pay among the highest prices for meals at an average of $41.76, came in about mid-level at tipping: 19.1-percent. Tipping over all has increased nationwide from an average of 18-percent a decade ago to 19.2-percent in 2010. It&amp;#039;s a good thing we&amp;#039;re tipping more than we used to, at least for the servers&amp;#039; sakes. Thirty-nine percent of us said we&amp;#039;re eating out less than did in the past and, by the same numbers, we&amp;#039;re paying more attention to the prices on the menu. Thirty-three percent of us eat in less expensive places than we used to. What do we eat when we dine out? Italian food is the most popular at 26-percent, followed by American at 17-percent. Working our way down the line: Japanese and French, 11-percent; Mexican, 10-percent; Thai, 8-percent; Chinese, 6-percent; and Indian, 5-percent. When we make those choices, many of us tend to throw another requirement into the mix. We want our restaurants to be green by serving locally sourced, organic or sustainably raised food. By far, the greenest diners live in Portland, Ore., 76-percent, and San Francisco, 72-percent. The diners who are the least interested in these things: Miami/South Florida, 49-percent; New York City, 49-percent; and Texas, at 50-percent.  How about you? Do aspiring food stylists annoy you when you&amp;#039;re dining out? How do you tip? What&amp;#039;s your favorite type of food? Tell us! We want to know! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.delish.com/food/news/a38324/zagat-who-are-the-worst-tippers/>