This past spring, Houston hosted the NCAA Final Four where the best U.S. college basketball teams played for the national championship. The Final Four is the country’s second­ most-popular sporting event, behind the Super Bowl. It attracts millions of TV viewers and more than US$100 million in con­sumer spending in the host city.

But during national champion­ship week in Houston, not all of the competition took place on the hardwood and not all of the players wore high tops.  In fact, some of the fiercest competition took place between chefs wield­ing rubber spatulas and sharpened knives in restaurant kitchens across the city.

Like most high-profile sporting events, very few tickets to the Final Four or the events leading up to the games were made available to the general public. Of the 144,000 tickets that were distributed for the two days of basketball, only seven percent were eligible for purchase by Houstonians.

So when the Final Four was awarded to  Houston in 2003, civic leaders wanted to ensure  that Houstonians could experience the excitement of the tournament. The city formed a Local Organizing Committee (LOC), which was tasked with planning a week’s worth of activities that all Hous­tonians could attend.  After seemingly endless hours of deliberation the LOC decided to put on a series of events including  tailgate parties, Bracket Town  (a large exhibition at the George R. Brown Convention Center that featured video games, basketball  clinics  and other  hoop­ related activities) and the Big Dance Concert Series.

But to really showcase the city, the LOC’s restaurant committee decided to play host to a region-wide compe­tition to draw attention to Houston’s culinary scene by selecting 32 restaurants that best represent the diversity of  the city’s eateries. The idea was to have the restaurants compete and have Houstonians vote to determine the best restaurant in the area.

The committee selected a wide variety of restaurants that specialize in Tex Mex, Italian, Asian,  Southern, New American,  seafood and home-style cuisine to par­ticipate in the competition. But the selections weren’t just made up of locally owned restaurants. National franchises such as PF Chang’s, House of Blues and Chili’s were also included, and competed head-to-head against local favorites such as Gigi’s Asian Bistro and The Break­fast Klub.

The  32 restaurants were arranged into four groups, known as brackets, and Houstonians were asked to vote online for their favorite restaurants over a three week period. To help the restaurants get the word out and encourage customers to vote, the LOC provided each participating venue with marketing materials such as table tents, window clings, flyers and a website widget for casting votes. And, of course, local food bloggers and res­taurant critics did their civic duty  by visiting as many res­taurants as they could to write reviews.

“Some restaurants got so into it they implemented their own voting cam­paigns,” says Rachel Quan, executive director of the Houston  Restaurant Associ­ation. “They shot emails to customers and made sure the news was up on their websites. A lot of the restaurant were pretty fanatical about getting out the vote.  Some were even able to get the lo­cal news to pick up on the story, and some TV stations broadcasted live from a few of the restaurants.”

Pulling off the restaurant contest was a challenge, Quan concedes.  She advises meeting planners who are thinking of organizing a similar type of city-wide,  bracketology-like contest to focus on two things: prepare your rules well and make sure your technology works if you’re going to encourage online voting.

The field of 32 eateries was reduced by half each week until the “Final Four” restaurants were determined. The restaurants that received the most vote were: Max’s Wine  Dive, The  Tasting  Room,  Ninfa’s on Navigation and Del Frisco’s. And the reward for being voted one of Houston’s four best restaurants? The opportunity to be one of the four featured caterers at the Big Dance Concert Series.

Concert Series-a three-day  musical event at Discovery Green, a park  lo­cated in  the heart of Houston. Each evening nearly  50,000  people made their way downtown for the event to listen to big-name entertainers including the Kings of Leon, Kenny Chesney, Uncle Cracker,  LL Cool J and  Sub­lime with Rome. The Big Dance Con­cert were by far the largest attraction during Final Four week.

Quan says the restaurants that made it to the final four were repre­sentative of Houston’s overall food scene, with two restaurants specializing in New American cuisine (Max’s Wine Dive and The Tasting  Room}, one in Tex-Mex (Ninfa’s} and, because the contest took place in Houston, a restaurant that serves lots of steak (Del Frisco’s).

Max’s is a small regional chain of restaurants restaurants and bars that services gourmet comfort food such as grilled cheese sand­wiches with tomato soup, macaroni and cheese and fried chicken.

The Tasting Room (which also owns Max’s} combines the sophistication you’d expect from a restaurant that serves fine wine with the kitchyness of a neighborhood bar with a jukebox.  It has an eclectic menu of artisan sandwiches, pizza, cheese plates and salads.

Ninfa’s has been a Houston institution for decades. Legend has it that mama Ninfa was the patron saint of Tex-Mex style cuisine. She’s also widely credited with in­venting the fajita, the first to turn an avocado into gua­camole and the one who  popularized the margarita. With a resume like that, it’s no wonder that her restaurant, which looks like a tiny shack on the side of the road , has a large and loyal following  among Houstonians.

Del Frisco’s is a small, high-end national steak house and seafood restaurant that serves Texas-size steaks (care to try the 24 oz. porterhouse with no bone?) and  jalapeno and bacon maca­roni and cheese (a local twist on tra­ditional comfort food).

And for just that one week, Hous­tonians new to the area – and those having lived there a while-were given the opportunity  to be introduced (or reintroduced) to some tasty cuisine prepared  by some of Houston’s finest culinary superstars.

In 2016, the Final Four will return to Houston and one can only imagine what city planners will have up their apron for that event. One+