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Trip Advisor beats the shit out of Yelp.

 

I battle with my wife on this when we go out of town. She wants to play it safe and go to a chain. I refuse to go any place we can get back home and scour Yelp and talk to people familiar with a particular area to find local options.

 

I got sick as a dog after eating a Sbarro slice in a mall. Never again.

 

I've never understood paying for Italian food. I just can't shake the impression that I could make the same dish myself at home for like nothing. Probably not true, but still.

 

Depends on where you are, I think. And what you're trying to do.

Yelp has more reviews, and many more locals posting to it. Trip Advisor, as the name suggests, is often a rating written by someone on a visit.

In the old days, if you wanted the real inside scoop, you'd cross reference both with chowhound dot com.

Now it's Hungry Onion or Food Talk Central.

 

Those are nice, but if I'm in Phoenix or Tucson or Myrtle Beach, I'm SOL.

 

I will never forget this one. Several of us were covering the Aloha Bowl in 1987. UCLA (Troy Aikman was a junior) vs. Florida (Emmitt Smith was a freshman). The game was on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, we got all of our preview work done early and set off around Oahu, stopping at Hanauma Bay first. We finished there and continued on around, but we needed to eat. We were in two cars, I told the driver of the first car (a prominent L.A. Times writer) that we were looking for something Hawaiian -- Kimo's Wiki Wiki Burgers, something like that. No chains, something local. So she drives right into McDonald's. NOOOOO. Why are you stopping here? I'm just too hungry, she said. We ate there. And not 10 minutes ahead was Kimo's Wiki Wiki Burgers. No lie.

 

But if you've got a semi smart phone, you have online access to things like Thrillist and Eater and TimeOut, etc.

Which is kind of my point.

If you have a phone, there's no reason to default to a mediocre chain restaurant in a strange city.

 

So what apps do you recommend?

I just punched everything you just listed on my phone and they have about 20ish reviews and/or totally NY centric. So, they are out.

I use Trip Advisor nationwide. I'm looking for something better.

 

Yelp, Trip Advisor, Four Square, Local Eats, Zomato (which used to be Urbanspoon)

Or just Google search "best meal in Phoenix" or "breakfast in Myrtle Beach" or "Tucson dinner" and you'll get at least a page worth of collated reviews.

 

I hope you did the responsible thing and ate again.

 

I was going to post something similar - Chains made way more sense in the days before smartphones or the even the Internet, when it was hard to do a lot of research before a trip. It's frustrating if a place doesn't have a menu posted online, but nowadays, you can still get enough info to narrow it down to a couple interesting, unique places.

I just moved to Texas, so the odd thing to me here is the overwhelming amount of like, regional chain restaurants. Like, I don't know if we've been to a restaurant yet that has just ONE location. It's always a half-dozen or more, but they're confined to Houston and its suburbs, maaybbeee down to Louisiana and some surrounding states.