gottacaseofwanderlust

The ultimate guide to navigate the food scene in ANY city: by a self-proclaimed foodie 🙂

I love traveling. The exhilaration of exploring somewhere new, the possibilities of sparking random connections with people, the wondrous beauty and novelty of a fresh landscape… and of course, the FOOD. 

While I consider health to be my number one value in my life, and 90% of the time, I am pretty freaking health-conscious, I’d be lying if I said that I am just as healthy while away from home. 

The truth is, the other 10% of the time, I am gorging my body on carbs on carbs. 

I can’t help it. There’s just too much good food in the world… 

So yeah. I am a foodie. I also admit that a large portion of my money goes towards food when I travel. Let’s not get into how much though (mostly because I don’t want to know). 

To clarify, I only select certain kinds of food to spend my money and stomach space on. 

I am NOT just going to the most trendy, popular restaurants in a city; on the contrary, I believe in supporting small businesses as often as I can. I will be publishing an article highlighting the importance of small businesses soon… so stay tuned. 

But ultimately, small businesses are the places that I believe have the best quality of foods, the most unique kinds of foods, and the most worthwhile investments. This is largely due to the immense time and effort that small businesses must put into their shop, as opposed to large chains that have the budget to sacrifice quality for efficiency. 

So, that is my baseline criteria when searching for good foods in an area. Is it a corporate owned chain with multiple locations or a locally owned business that’s specific to the geographic location?

If it is the latter, I then look at the most popular food items that they sell, and consider if they are exceptionally unique (meaning I can’t find it anywhere else) or impressively high in quality (I check the customer reviews for this). 

Once I deem the food worthy of possibly trying, my last standard is the reviews (in the USA, I use either Yelp or Google Maps, but only Google Maps abroad). 

A really promising sign, that is almost foolproof that it is a good food spot, is 4.9-5 stars: a perfect rating. 

The amount of views doesn’t really hold much weight, unless I’m comparing similar places with similar reviews. 

And sometimes, less reviews is better because it signifies that it’s NOT touristy which is always GOOD because touristy places are, typically, not worth the hype, And they’re almost always overpriced! 

What’s more important than quantity of reviews is the quality of reviews. 

Are the reviews listed high appraisals with lengthy descriptions of how much the customer liked the place? 

If it passes this final test, the food spot is added to my list of “food places” in the given city.  

So now that you know how I determine which food spots I eat at, I’ll briefly explain how I determine which of the visited food spots are awarded the title of “recommendations”. 

This criteria is actually a lot simpler — I just ask myself: was the food spot truly a standout place that I would go to again myself? 

If yes, then you will find the winners in my city food guides 🙂 

Let me know if you go to any of my recommended food spots in the comments and if you have any food spot recommendations for me! I am always appreciative of food recommendations 🙂