The lunchtime population test is the fastest and most reliable method available: walk past the restaurant at 1pm on a weekday and look at who is eating there. If it's mostly locals in work clothes, it's a good restaurant. If it's mostly tourists with backpacks and guidebooks on the table, it's a restaurant that has optimised for tourists. Both kinds of restaurant know exactly what they are.

Google Maps Sorted by Newest Review

TripAdvisor is too gameable and too dominated by volume. Google Maps has a filter that most people miss: sort reviews by "Newest first." This shows you what real, recent visitors thought rather than the accumulated legacy of five years of tourist enthusiasm. A restaurant with a 4.2 average but strong recent reviews is more trustworthy than one with a 4.6 built on reviews from 2019.

Look at the photos in recent reviews. Are they the food photos of someone who knows what they're looking at, or the obligatory documentation shot of a tourist? The quality of the photo is often a proxy for the quality of the reviewer's engagement with the place.

Instagram Food Accounts in the Local Language

Every city with a food culture has Instagram accounts dedicated to it, run by locals, in the local language. Search for the city name in the local language alongside food-related terms. In Spanish cities: search for "comida [city name]" or "gastro [city name]". In Italian cities: "mangiare [city name]" or "ristoranti [city name] consigliati." The accounts that appear are run by people who live there and eat there regularly.

This takes ten minutes before the trip and produces a shortlist of places that no algorithm has yet optimised into tourist-facing territory.

Ask a Pharmacist or Newsagent, Not a Hotel Concierge

Hotel concierges are useful for many things (see the separate piece on using a hotel concierge properly). Restaurant recommendations are not their strength because they operate in the same world as the tourist-facing restaurant. They recommend places they have relationships with or places they know won't embarrass them.

The pharmacist, the newsagent, or the person behind the counter at the bakery you've already found is a genuinely local person with no professional incentive to steer you anywhere in particular. The question to ask: "Where would you go for lunch today if you had time?" Not "where's a good restaurant nearby," which produces the safe answer. The personal framing gets a personal answer.

The Full Car Park Theory

For any restaurant that appears to be located in a slightly inconvenient suburban or non-central location, check the car park at lunchtime on a weekday. A full car park at a restaurant outside the city centre on a Tuesday lunchtime means the food is genuinely good. Nobody drives to a mediocre restaurant in an industrial park out of habit. They drive there because the food is worth it. This applies in France and Spain especially, where the serious lunch destination is often a white building on an unpromising road with a full car park and no Instagram presence whatsoever.