Cheap airplane tickets and discount hotel rooms or cheap vacation packages are great ways to start a trip. However identifying really good restaurants to visit only enhances your trip. Experienced travelers want to avoid eating poor food at high prices. Most tourist sites offer brochures listing many nearby restaurants whose main goal is to collect as many tourist dollars as possible. Some of these restaurants may offer a good meal, but often you will pay more that you should for less than a really good meal.
If you were asked to recommend restaurants to visitors to your hometown, most likely you could do a very good job based on your previous experiences. The challenge is how to do this when traveling.
Generally speaking you will find the best restaurants on the road by eating where the locals eat. The following are suggestions on how to find such restaurants:
City specific Best Of guides are a great tool in indentifying really good places to eat. Since these guides readership is local, their goal is to identify the best and off the beaten track restaurants that locals love and find affordable. Such guides are easy to find by doing an Internet search and entering in the name of the city you are visiting and weekly paper.
Websites and smartphone apps can help find restaurants. Urbanspoon and Yelp are just a few examples of sites that do good jobs rating and identifying restaurants in a wide range of cities. If you are looking for a good breakfast, start by doing a search by entering best (then city name) breakfast will show you lots of interesting options.
Sometimes simply looking in the window of a restaurant you are passing can give you a good impression. Patrons in work or casual clothes are likely to be locals, who do not return to a restaurant offering poor or overpriced food or poor service. Another thing to look for is if the patrons appear to be enjoying themselves. Restaurants where people are laughing and talking tend to be good.
www.cheapfares.com