Last updated on April 13th, 2025
–by Graham Hill
For anyone visiting or moving to a new city, finding the best restaurants can be both fun and challenging. Every big city offers many restaurants to explore; but we only have so much time and money, we can’t afford to explore them all.
So, how does anyone find the best food in a new city?
Finding Good Restaurants in a New City
In cities around the world, tourists and new residents that want a great place to eat commonly walk around the popular districts, keeping an eye out for noisy crowds or long lines. While this is a common strategy, the most obvious restaurants in the most touristy areas are often far from the best that the city has to offer.
Another solution modern travelers use is to dig through reviews on Google Maps or TripAdvisor. Problems arise when the ratings on review sites seem inflated; why does every shop seem to have at least “four stars?”
The TripAdvisor Experience
Is TripAdvisor useful? While the site can help identify a list of common restaurants, personally, the experiences I have with sites like TripAdvisor are often disappointing.
The typical visitor to TripAdvisor might start by searching for the “best hamburgers” for a given city, and then look at the reviews and ratings of the listed restaurants. With hundreds of user-generated reviews, we might expect TripAdvisor to help us identify the best local restaurants for the major cities. In reality, what I tend to find is that many of those ratings are written by tourists, for other tourists coming to that city to do touristy things. Very often tourists tend to group together, in bars and restaurants that are not at all like the places the local people go. If your goal is to find the best food that the city has to offer, there are better places to look than TripAdvisor or Google Maps.
One alternative is asking a local for recommendations. While individual recommendations are hit or miss, someone who lives in that city is often more likely to know the local cuisine and the less obvious restaurants that the locals love.
Local Restaurant Review Blogs
My personal favorite answer about how to find the best restaurants in a new city is to find local online food blogs that post reviews for individual restaurants.
Local restaurant review blogs often bring both local knowledge and a more sophisticated perspective than a review from the average tourist on TripAdvisor. When you can find them – local restaurant review websites produced by someone that lives in that city can be a great way to find the best restaurants.
How to Find the Best Food in a City
To find the best restaurants in a city, asking a local – whether that be a friend, an acquaintance, or turning to strangers on X or Reddit – can be an ideal source of reliable restaurant recommendations.
The best recommendations for restaurants will almost always be from a local resident, and especially when that local person has real expertise with food and restaurants. When I visit a new location and I want to skip all the tourist attractions, I look for restaurant review blogs written by locals.
A good local restaurant review blog often provides better restaurant recommendations than the other options. A local that writes restaurant reviews has two qualities that give their reviews more value: the author loves eating enough to dedicate a whole blog to that topic, and has the passion to go out and find good food one restaurant after another.
Personally, I trust articles from local food reviewers more than the mass of naïve visitors posting reviews after stumbling into tourist traps.
How to Find Good Local Food Review Websites
It is not always easy finding these restaurant and food review blogs for popular cities. A Google search usually offers TripAdvisor, international travel sites, and other websites that can be unfocused and less helpful. However, if you know where to look, each major city has some excellent local restaurant review websites.
Recently, I had the chance to do some research to find the best restaurant review blogs around the world. Some strategies I used to find these local restaurant review blogs were: 1.) For the city that interests you, look for websites that feature reviews for a famous restaurant in that city. Everyone writes about the big-name restaurants; it can be a good way to identify local restaurant bloggers. 2.) Search for local food blogs that specialize on the city you’re going to visit. 3.) Find columnists in local newspapers reviewing local restaurants in that city.
For big cities around the world, each of those sources have the potential to lead you to high-quality restaurant reviews you can trust.
Qualities of a Great Restaurant Review Website
For my research, I visited countless numbers of local restaurant review sites. As with a search for anything on the internet, there were a full range of websites in terms of quality. If you are looking for local restaurant review websites to find the best food in that area, here are some qualities that make a great restaurant review blog:
Honesty: I personally trust a restaurant reviewer more when that food writer includes some negative reviews on their website. While it can be nice to say positive things about a restaurant, honest reviews (including comments about what the review doesn’t like) add credibility to the author’s opinion.
A Local Focus: There are many international travel blogs that have restaurant reviews for major cities around the world, but the reviewer was only in the city for a short time, and is not really a local expert. Many of these authors have great taste, but actual locals that have lived in that location for a long time are more likely to know the best restaurants.
Good Pictures: In today’s day and age, it is normal to look through social media for restaurants. However, social media has a limit on how many pictures and words can be included in a review. A great restaurant review site has the quality and quantity of pictures that social media cannot provide. It is also a plus if there are pictures that go beyond the food, capturing the feel and atmosphere of the restaurant and what it is like to spend some time there.
Ease of Use: Even when the reviews are good, the website is less useful when navigating through the reviews is a pain. The best sites have relatively few ads, clear categories for the reviews, are easy to use on mobile phones, and load quickly.
Comparisons of Local Restaurants: It also helps when a reviewer makes comparisons between similar restaurants in the area. When you start with one restaurant, and the local food blogger can provide other suggestions for the same type of food, it helps you understand your local choices. Food blogs for a local city that can offer this kind of comparison have more credibility.
Examples of Local Restaurant Review Websites
In my search for the best local restaurant review websites around the world, I was able to find some gems.
One example is The Plate Licked Clean, run by a local in the UK. This blog fits all the above criteria. Some key points that make this blog great are the voice, pictures, and simplicity of the reviews of restaurants in the UK (particularly Cardiff in Wales). You can feel the author’s love and passion for eating, reading through the words written in his distinct voice. Although his collection of reviews is still building up, he is posting at a rate that would make the website even more valuable as time goes on.
Another local restaurant website I looked at was OsakaCity.com, a new website that offers local restaurant reviews for Osaka, Japan. This site was still under development when I found it, but was already an excellent local authority, especially for certain categories like Osaka pizza restaurants. This website has in-depth reviews for many types of businesses, including detailed reviews (with original pictures) for several of the best pizza shops in Osaka. The author has a distinct voice that makes it fun to read, and his bluntness in some of his reviews make the experience entertaining on its own.
My last example is Beer Tengoku. This is a niche restaurant review site, where everything on the website is related to beer in Japan. Beer Tengoku is one of the websites where the author’s passion for the genre is overflowing, making the reader excited for that food too. This website covers everything beer in Japan: from craft beers to draft beers, beer bars, breweries, and even food that goes with beer. Beer Tengoku is the must place to look for anything beer related in Japan.
A Passion for Food in Restaurant Review Blogs
When you recognize a local restaurant blogger’s passion – a true love for food – it creates trust for you as the reader.
The best restaurant review sites are run by writers that love going out, that truly love food, and that are on their own journey to find the best restaurants in their city. Local restaurant reviews give us the opportunity to benefit from a local perspective, and lead us along the path towards remarkably good experiences and exceptionally tasty meals.
