How can I find new restaurants to go to?

- inspeckta

Posted on Oct 26, 2011 in Find things, Food & drink

find online restaurants

It seems like I always end up going to the same old places, week in, week out, month after month. So what’s the best way to find a new restaurant I might actually like?

Food n00bs

So you just picked up McDonald’s for the third time this week and you’re starting to think that you need more variety in your dining experience. Well, that’s probably a good idea. But where to start? Do you just start driving around and trying every restaurant in town? Well, I suppose you could, although that would get expensive after a while. So how do you find somewhere decent? Read on.

Oh internet, what can’t you do?

Remember when you had to wait for the newspaper to run its weekly restaurant critic reviews? Yeah, ok, just barely for me too. Well, why wait — and why just read one person’s review, when there’s a variety of crowdsourced review options on the internetwebs?

Yelp: A simple 5-star rating system and a history of clever, amusing, and helpful reviews, Yelp still tends to be the “go to” restaurant review site. Be forewarned however — it seems that some poor reviews can be/have been removed by request of the restaurants. Their mobile app is simple and easy to use, for checking restaurants on the go.

Urban Spoon: Urban Spoon, considered to be more of the “foodie’s” site, relies less on the rating system (using a simple Like It/Don’t Like It percentage) and much more heavily on user reviews. Like Yelp, they also offer an innovative, fun, and easy to use mobile app.

Zagat: The gold standard in restaurant reviews, Zagat also offers members to review restaurants as well. You can see reviews as a guest or a Basic member (Basic as in “free”), but if you want to see the actual Zagat ratings you have to pay for a membership. Still a good resource.

Google: When all else fails, pull up Google and type in “restaurants near Puke Hollow, Arkansas” or where have you. Google also offers restaurant reviews, though they seem to be far less popular than the above sites, this certainly can be another resource.

And, of course — just drive around and look for something interesting, you might be the one to “discover” the new hot spot in your town!

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