As the consumer of the journalistic product his newspaper will soon be dropping on your doorstep, you need to be warned about the pitfalls of such work. Such stories are frequently written for the sole purpose of lending cover to an excessive expense account claim. Meals that expensive rarely produce information anyone can remember. It is a sign of a hopeless elitist, or worse, an aspiring elitist. There are only nine neighborhood bars left in all America.
Any story quoting a taxi driver is likely to be a shabby job.
Reporting was probably conducted entirely on the trip from airport to hotel. There are polls and there are polls. Opinion polls done prior to a state primary are always dicey because the size of the turnout as a percentage of the population is always much lower than the general election turnout in November. The polls this year have often been laughably wide of the mark. That is partly because there are a lot of independent voters out there who have been voting in party primaries.