How do you choose a restaurant when travelling?

Trust my instinct (or my partner’s)

Restaurants all over the world look similar (except that warsaw restaurant up there, that looks like an asylum from the outside ), have similar menus, and scam tourists the same way.

Our rule of thumb is : don’t go to a restaurant that i would never go at home.

What does that exclude?

• Tourist Nexus Areas (big, crowded, monument-full zones)
• Dark, weird-looking,cheap alley restaurants.

• Restaurants that have more foreign (for the locals) items on their menu than other types of food. (example : a breakfast diner full of spanish and french specialties, in London. ) i’d actually avoid any restaurant that offers more than two languages on their carte.

• Restaurants that cook mainly the food where i’m from ( Nobody can cook like we (average person living in X country) locals cook, not even our tourists-oriented restaurants,so why would country Y cook do better at country X food ? and what’s the fun in eating the same, 4000km away? )

Finally:

Ask locals when you can’t find something useful ( althought you might ask the wrong local and end up in a 40$-the-serving 3 michellin fork no-sports-wear restaurant )

Ask our phone using coffee shop / macdonalds / bking / KFC wifi, google maps offers a wide range of well-starred and moderated restaurants.

I am surprised noone mentioned Chowhound. I have used this site many, many times with much bigger success than Yelp. Yelp is controversial because it depends on the advertisement of the exact same businesses it reviews. That can’t lead to anything good. Chowhound forum format leads to less … problems.

I used to use Foursquare for that purpose frequently and it never let me down. Recently however, it seems that the user ratings cannot be trusted anymore (biased, falsified etc.). There were some 9+ star restaurants I visited in different cities and was totally disappointed with both the quality of the food and the price (aka tourist trap).
So, I usually ask for the advice my friends who are from, or stayed at the city I am travelling to. Moreover, I do a google search for the “top 10 restaurants in “Name of the city” ” and cross-check the results with other sources to be sure whether I can trust it or not.
In the worst case, I just go to the nearest McDonalds 🙂

I found this recently and it gives a good set of tips. Basically it answers the question the other way around. Not how to find a good restaurant but how to avoid a bad one.

One kf the most intersting is the one that relates the quality of the menu print with restaurant quality.

There are several intersting tips:

How to choose a great restaurant from reading the menu.

If you really want to dine with the locals and eat authentic cuisine of the place you are visiting check out this new website EatWith which enables you to have local dining experiences in people’s homes around the world.

See also their Twitter page.

An interesting solution that I’ve been using lately is resorting to group sale websites like groupon.
I’ve heard all kind of theories about why the restaurants want to be there – from the near bankrupt last resort saving tool to the bad food restaurant trying to save the day. In my experience I always got a nice meal at an affordable price. (depending on what affordable means to you)

Usually restaurants take the effort to serve well, because most websites have a review system. They also want returning clients, and that is a way of making themselves known. The restaurants are usually not too crowded. You may have restrictions on the days though. Many times this discounts seem to exist to fill less busy days.

The price may not always be the extreme bargains that they announce but in average, in my experience, it’s value for money and it’s not hard to find local cuisine, since most of these advertisements aim at locals.

Regarding online guide, I really like FoodSpotting which gives you a map of nearby dishes in restaurant. It has a quite good world coverage and they have an app.

One practical solution is to find a bookshop and check various guidebooks there, not necessarily travel guides but also books intended for locals. Obviously, the bookshop would probably want you to buy the book instead so don’t be too obnoxious.

The only reliable way I found to eat out in local restaurants is when I was accompanied by local friends.

Sometimes, good local restaurants are outside the city and need some car driving. Sometimes they are on side and back streets. Sometimes this is just a cafeteria crowded only by locals or street food served in shops that are far less shiny than the neighbouring McDonald’s.

But the best local eating experience I usually have is at friend’s home.

When I receive foreign friends I always try to bring them to the local farmer’s market so that we can cook local meals with local products.

If you want to eat in a high quality restaurant where they serve good food (where ever this maybe in the world), but for sure in towns & villages of Europe, you abide by one golden rule:

Look for the restaurant which is near full to capacity of locals and avoid the restaurant which is virtually empty.

Even if it means queueing it will be worth the wait.

Simple as that…..

Edit:

Also avoid those restaurants where the menu is displayed in multiple languages (as these are geared towards tourists).

What worked for me many times is looking up the top choice in your guidebook. Find the restaurant, skip it and go next door. This of course is just some kind of heuristics.

Throughout Europe I’ve been using the Michelin guides to find restaurants. They have a rating for fanciness and awesomeness of food. I usually go to the restaurants with one fork, which means it has good food for a good price (it tells you the price in the guide).
There is an app as well you can download and find all the restaurants in your area.

I used the app a lot in Scotland where we found amazing fish restaurants which otherwise would have been hard to find. Michelin tries to get you away from the tourist hot-spots and into the windy road with a charming restaurant at its end.
(I don’t work for Michelin, I just like what they do!)

An option sugested by a friend is asking in Couch Surfing forums. This is a very good place since the persons there are usually locals or live on the place for some time. They usually enjoy travelling also. To wrap this up, they have local knowledge and will probably understand what you’re looking for.

Local food groups

Like I mentioned in my answer on how to become a better tourist guide in your home city / country, one of the best ways of discovering of discovering the best local (and usually cheap) places to eat is to find out about the local food-lovers groups in the city. Some of these run scheduled, professionally organised walking food trips (like the one in Bangkok); most have some sort of food guide / blog to the city (search Google for “X food blog” or “X food lovers” where X is a city. These food guides are sometimes even available in printed form (for example, this guide on Istanbul food) and quite often they mention little-known gems that don’t “look” popular.

Apps / Websites

I have mixed feelings about apps (such as Foursquare) and sites such as TripAdvisor / Yelp. I have sometimes had good recommendations through these on what’s a good place to eat or what’s “popular” but over time what I’ve found is that these tend to skew towards places that are popular among just tourists as opposed to where the locals eat. (And more often than not, “popular” on user-contributed sites tend to mirror Lonely Planet recommendations just because it’s a most popular guide out there.) I’ve often been disappointed to find a place that had superlative reviews on user-contributed sites, because there is simply no way of knowing whether the reviewer can tell their schweinshaxe from their tabbouleh.

Food recommendations is one aspect in which think Wikivoyage / Wikitravel are massive failures. They may give you a very good general description of the dishes you can find in a country / region, but they are very bad at curating the best places to eat and presenting to it in a visually-useful manner. (Simply a classifieds-type listing without map information is very hard to turn into usable information while actually out and about in a city.) Moreover, I’ve found the ‘reviews’ or descriptions stray towards staying as neutral as they can, which is great for say monuments but not that much for something so obviously dependent on subjective judgement such as food.

Guidebooks

Top tip: when you buy a guidebook from Lonely Planet / Rough Guides / Frommer’s etc, flip to the section on author profiles and find out how long they have lived in the country. I’m not saying it’s impossible for someone who’s spent less time in a country to make good recommendations (depends on what local sources they tap) but my general observation has been that if it was an author sent to the country just for a few weeks to cover a particular section for their country, their recommendations are usually tepid. Look out for authors who have spent serious time in the country / region (say, at least a quarter of a year or more) and trust their recommendations more. Many guidebooks these days have multiple authors based on the region of the country, so you shouldn’t (dis)trust the book as a whole; just the bit that author themselves reviewed.

Some Neighborhoods Serve Good Food, Others Not

I find that the standard for what counts as good food varies dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood. The result is that a cheap greasy burger joint might be considered the panacea for all hunger in some areas, while in other areas almost every restaurant has well prepared dishes made from fresh ingredients — even the fast food.

I often use this principle to first decide what neighborhood to patronize, then pick a specific restaurant by whatever other means available. Often, a few tens of miles of difference in geography completely changes the general quality of food.

Telltails of Which Kind of Neighborhood You’re In

Bad:

• there is a preponderance of fast food restaurants
• …or worse, there are lineups at the fried chicken drive thru
• the only grocery stores are Walmart and Costco
• Yelp reviews for restaurants are dominated by aspects other than the food itself (price, view, speed, convenience, serving staff)
• the area is frequented by passers by who might never return (e.g. tourist traps, shopping districts)
• people don’t live in the neighborhood

Good:

• there are butchers, bakeries, and farmers markets
• there are gyms and yoga studios and you actually see people using them
• residents walk to the restaurants, grocery stores, and coffee shops
• the hipster coffee shop is at least as busy as the starbucks beside it
• homes have food gardens
• the neighborhood has a lot of people living a bohemian lifestyle

If I’m totally lacking in knowledge on the area, I tell the concierge (or staff) at the hotel I’m staying that I’d like to find a restaurant which offers local foods in this amount of budget.

If he/she recommends the restaurant in the hotel itself (possibly not the right choice..), I ask again, to tell me the restaurant they go to frequently.

This works most of the time. The only time it didn’t work was, when I was visiting Malaga Spain, since we can’t speak Spanish. Fortunately, the restaurant we visited was good every time. This scheme didn’t work well in UK either ;p.

Just some days ago, I was on the streets in Spain with a friend, and she decided to ask a policeman for a place to have lunch. The restaurant he recommended was indeed popular with policemen. There were several daily menus on offer, at low price, and food was a plenty – I could not finish the desert.

Concerning asking locals: Sometimes I ask several, and it may be a good idea to say something like: I’m on a budget, cannot pay much. Then look at the food being served, at the people in the restaurant, at the menu, and all that usual stuff.

Also, it depends what food is common in the region. If you are close to the sea, for example, then it is likely that fish is good and cheap, sometimes even in tourist places.

I always consult Happycow. This is a website for vegetarian, vegan, and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. A good side-effect is that I end up at some very unusual and non-touristic places, and that the number of options reduced from hundreds to a handful or a few dozen at most. Perhaps you don’t always want to eat vegetarian, but even as a non-vegetarian you can eat vegetarian occasionally.

In November 2012 I passed through Warsaw and had lunch at the highly unlikely Surya restaurant. As I was looking for the restaurant I was convinced that I had the address wrong, because I completely left the old centre and found myself walking through a residential neighbourhood with high concrete flats and no stores or restaurants at all.

Surya Restaurant, Warsaw. A unique experience with no tourists.

I was there at a quite unusual time (15:30-ish), so it was quite empty inside, but considering the surroundings, the inside was quite a surprise:

Surya Restaurant inside.

There is no way I would have found a place like this simply by strolling around. I wouldn’t eat there every day (vegan raw food is a bit extreme), but as an occasional experience, even non-vegetarians may find themselves in quite unusual places off the beaten track.

More and more, I actually go *un*prepared. This lack of preconceived notion results in an experience that’s much more unique.
Sure, you will not always end up at the ‘best’ place, but, clearly, that’s not what you are (or I am) looking for. For that, there’s a whole slew of apps and guidebooks.

And, it’s easy to avoid the tourist traps and overly popular places. Use side- and backstreets. Follow someone who looks like he’s going out for dinner. Walk for a few minutes in a random direction. Think about what you want to eat and then look for something completely different.

There are some strategies that you can use:

• Prepare: Check websites like Tripadvisor or Yelp before you go there. If you really want to plan, write down the restaurants you want to visit. Based on the ratings and comments there, you should be able to judge if it is an authentic restaurant with a good service.

• Don’t stick to the main street: Very often, tourist places attract tourist restaurants. So to get a more authentic experience, go to the areas where not a lot of tourists go. Sometimes it is enough to just go one block off the main street and you will find no tourists.

• Avoid obvious tourist traps: There are some hints that can tell you immediately if the restaurant is a tourist trap. As user1187008 pointed out for example, one should avoid restaurants with a big illustrated menu in English (especially, if English is not the local language)
  

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– Observe the locals: Check out where the locals go to eat. They know best what restaurants are good.

• Use the internet: Try to find local blogs which emphasize of food. For every major city, you will find such food/restaurant blogs.

• Be spontaneous: Tripadvisor and other websites have apps for smartphones that allow you to check the restaurants in the surroundings of your current location.

• Ask a friend: As Rory Alsop pointed out, it is always a good idea to ask a local friend for advice if you know anybody at the destination.