> We use Google/Yelp and just pick a place with good reviews
You must have better luck with reviews than I! Personally, I've never really noticed a strong correlation between the reviews a place gets and how good the place actually is.
My favorite signal: go where it's busy! Locals know what's good, and especially in a developing country, you want to go somewhere that is moving product, instead of having it sit in questionable storage facilities, incubating things your gut isn't prepared to deal with.
- Best food I had in India: all the hopping street food and holes-in-the-walls (and yeah, a fancier restaurant or two)
- Only TD I got in India: an opulent tourist trap where we were the only people eating. That made the drive from Agra to Delhi extra memorable!
I agree -- this has been my go-to for a while: eat where the locals eat.
But you do still have to be a little discerning. The old saying, for instance, that you should eat at places that truckers favor isn't accurate unless you're a trucker, because they have additional requirements unrelated to food, such as whether or not you can maneuver and park an 18 wheeler in its lot.
I agree with "go where it's busy", but first we check the reviews to get a list of places to check for busy-ness. As a bonus, in some places Google will tell you how busy a place is right then so you don't even have to walk over!
You have to read the reviews and make sure they are in praise of the food and not the atmosphere/service/price/etc. Also it's really important to read the worst reviews for comments about the food.
Agreed. However, with reviews in general (and restaurant reviews especially), I have discovered that my experiences and the experiences of reviewers (both good and bad) are simply not well correlated. It wasn't always this way -- a decade or so ago, reviews had value to me. But something has changed.
I've eaten at places that appeared good if you read the reviews, but turned out to be horrible, and I've eaten at places that had terrible reviews but turned out to be fantastic.
If you get value from reviews, though, that's great!
You must have better luck with reviews than I! Personally, I've never really noticed a strong correlation between the reviews a place gets and how good the place actually is.