We are going to step out of the kitchen for this installment and go out onto the road.  Finding a good place to eat can be a real shot in the dark when you are traveling.  You never know if you are getting the best that an area has to offer.  Here are a few things I do to ensure that I am going to find the  best local restaurants when I arrive at my destination...

There is no need to watch Diners, Dives, and Drive-Ins for hours on end, in the hopes a restaurant in your destination city will be featured.  Use the internet to find the best places to eat.  The most common method is to use Google or Yahoo search.  For example, if you are headed to Charleston, West Virginia, you may enter the following terms: restaurant review charleston wv at Google, and you will be presented with a decent selection of  review sites.

Most of the search results from the query  link to what I call "box-store" restaurant review sites.  These are sites like tripadvisor.com, mytravelguide.com, or travelocity.com.  These are nice websites, with a lot restaurants and reviews in their database.  But if you actually read them you find that the individual reviews are lacking in content. Most of them are one liners with no real information about what was served, and there is virtually no insight on quality of service, etc.

There may also be a few local newspaper sites with review sections featured in these searches as well. As a rule, I distrust most newspaper restaurant reviews. On more than one occasion, I have read a newspaper review give a glowing review of a restaurant, yet when I go there, the food and service was actually pretty poor. It seems that many local papers have a fear of being critical of businesses within their own  readership area.  Why offend there main source of advertising revenue?

So, I have resorted to some other ways to find information about places to eat. One way to get more information about places to eat is to add the term blog to your search.  For example: restaurant review blog charleston wv.  If you want to get the scoop on the local food scene then the lowly food blog is the best place to find information about the best local cuisine.

Note that at the top of the search for restaurant review blog charleston, wv is a site called Forkyou. There is another site that is devoted solely to the best hot dog stands call ed The West Virginia Hot Dog Blog. These are two examples of local restaurant review blogs that offer an unbiased review of restaurants in the Charleston West Virginia area. Sites like these are becoming common in many small to mid sized cities.

 

Once you find information about a particular place you may like to visit, then you may be able to find a web site that shows hours of operations and more importantly, a  menu online.