Best Foursquare mayor deals offered by local restaurants

Customer loyalty is big business, but how annoying is it to keep track of your visits (and potential free food) with a dozen stamp cards in your wallet or tags on your keychain? It's much easier to rely on your trusty smartphone to track your visits to the places you drink and dine most frequently. Plenty of local restaurants are using Foursquare to reward their best customers, but which ones are offering the really good free stuff to the person with the greatest number of check-ins? The Hot Dish is breaking it down for you. 

Do cold temperatures have you sticking to the skyway in downtown St. Paul? Take them all the way to Senor Wong (111 Kellogg Blvd.) and get a free tap beer and a taco every time you check in while you are mayor.

Check in as mayor on a Saturday night at Fuji-Ya (600 W Lake Street) and get free bottomless sake for you and three friends. The catch is that they only keep it coming for a half hour (7-7:30), which makes sense, since they probably don't want all the hot sake to turn you into a hot mess.

Frequent the Bulldog (401 E. Hennepin Ave.)? If you go to the Northeast location enough, you'll get a drink of your choice and a Bulldog beer opener on the house during your mayoral term. 

If you take a lot of weekend trips to Stillwater, make it your new goal to unseat the current mayor of Smalley's Caribbean Barbeque and Pirate Bar (423 Main Street, Stillwater) because they generously give a free shot and an order of wings to the person who wears that coveted crown.

If you swing into the restaurants at Rosedale for your pre-movie dinner, you might want to start racking up points at Granite City (851 Rosedale Ctr). They offer their mayor a free 20-ounce beer or a free flatbread.

At Crave (825 Hennepin Ave. and other locations) you don't even have to be the mayor to cash in on a pretty decent special. Every fifth check-in here earns you a free Mediterranean Platter appetizer with hummus, olives, roasted garlic, and pita.

As the mayor of Toppers, we can only assume you're hungover a lot. But hey, at least your title means you get 50 percent off all food whenever you go there. That's a whole lot of Topperstix.