109 restaurants opened in Phoenix, Albuquerque, Honolulu, and Lincoln in July. Here is the paper trail.

In July 2026, 109 restaurants opened across four metros we picked for their differences: Phoenix (a 5 million person metro), Honolulu (an island), Albuquerque, and Lincoln (a college town of 300 thousand). Same pipeline in all four. Phoenix produced 75 verified openings, Honolulu 20, Albuquerque 9, Lincoln 5. That works out to roughly 10 to 20 openings per million residents in every market, which is what a repeatable detection pipeline should produce.

What the table shows

• 71 of 109 openings have a government paper trail. Each row links the record: Maricopa County food permits and Mesa building permits in Phoenix, city building permits in Albuquerque, Department of Health food inspections and Liquor Commission filings in Honolulu, and state liquor licenses in Lincoln.
• Health inspections beat Google. In Honolulu, the state health department's new-establishment inspection lands a median of 10 days before the first Google review. The government knew first.
• Not every opening is a new restaurant, and Ora says which is which. 89 are true new openings, 8 are new locations of existing brands, 6 are relocations, and 6 are ownership changes at an existing address.
• 58 of 109 are not on any delivery platform yet. A restaurant that opened three weeks ago has no website half the time and no delivery presence most of the time.
• The smallest operators leave the faintest trail. A few openings in this table are home kitchens and stands with no permit under their own name, no website, and no press. They are real, they are open, and only their first customers noticed.

Every region files differently

Phoenix restaurants surface through county food permits. Honolulu restaurants surface through state health inspections and county liquor filings. Nebraska publishes liquor licenses weekly at the state level. Albuquerque puts building permits in a city CSV. Ora maps the agencies and record types region by region across all 50 states, so an opening in Lincoln is detected with the same machinery as an opening in Phoenix.

Restaurants leave breadcrumbs online before they open. Ora agents track them across all states and can find an opening, on average, 88 days in advance. In 80% of the openings, Ora also finds the owner and their contact information.

Showing the first 15 of 109 rows.

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