Best/most reliable restaurant reviews?

[TSBG]

I feel sure there must have been a thread about this, but I couldn’t turn one up.

What source provides the best restaurant reviews, in your opinion?

[don_t_ask]

Not TripAdvisor I guess: I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor.

And then, one day, sitting in the shed I live in, I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation, and society’s willingness to believe absolute bullshit, maybe a fake restaurant is possible? Maybe it’s exactly the kind of place that could be a hit?

In that moment, it became my mission. With the help of fake reviews, mystique and nonsense, I was going to do it: turn my shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.

[Alpha_Twit]

I’ve only ever used YELP. It’s…adequate…, I guess. I don’t doubt there’s better options.

[Dewey_Finn]

Isn’t this dependent on where you live? If you live in Chicago, are the best or most reliable reviews of L.A. restaurants helpful to you?

But in short, I’d recommend the old standby of the local newspaper. Barring that, perhaps the Zagat guides?

[TSBG]

I don’t necessarily assume local reviewers are unbiased, unless it’s a really big city where any one restaurant’s snit over a bad review won’t threaten the reviewer’s livelihood.

I haven’t used Zagat recently, but are they still biased to the high end like they used to be? Their reviews were always good, but it wasn’t so useful for finding the neighborhood gem with no tablecloths and simple but awesome food.

[pulykamell]

Here in Chicago, I like the foodie website LTH.com. There are forums that branch off into restaurants beyond Chicagoland, but it’s focus is local. I would check to see if there are some similar local message boards where you live.

Otherwise, I also enjoy roadfood.com for finding interesting restaurants along the way on a road trip or in cities I’m visiting. Yelp, as mentioned before, is adequate, but there’s a way I read Yelp reviews, and I find often my favorite restaurants hover around 4.0-4.3 stars, not in the 4.5+ range. Not sure what it is. Plus a lot of Yelp reviewers are just idiots, who down vote restaurants for the stupidest shit (often the reviewers own ignorance) and think they’re oh-so-witty-and-clever in their reviews, so it takes some digging through reading the positive and negative reviews to figure out whether a restaurant is worth trying for me.

But those really are pretty much the resources I use. I’m not much of a fan of the local food critics here, so I don’t really use newspapers. There’s also a good number of local Youtube content regarding restaurants, so I also check with them to see if anything piques my interest.

[jnglmassiv]

@pulykamell

Here in Chicago, I like the foodie website LTH.com. There are forums that branch off into restaurants beyond Chicagoland, but it’s focus is local. I would check to see if there are some similar local message boards where you live.

Minor correction: it is lthforum.com. I know of a few others that post in both there and here at SDMB.

[pulykamell]

@jnglmassiv

Minor correction: it is lthforum.com. I know of a few others that post in both there and here at SDMB.

Yes. Lthforum. No friggin idea why I missed the second half. I’m just so used to calling it LTH in conversation with people who are familiar with it, and I guess my brain elided the rest of the actual URL.

[lisiate]

@don_t_ask

Not TripAdvisor I guess: I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor.

Wow, that’s an amazing story. And it only took 96 reviews!