Eating Well in a Town You Do Not Know

Finding a good meal in an unfamiliar town is a pattern-recognition problem, not a research problem. A handful of visible signals will get you further than an hour of scrolling reviews written by people with different priorities than yours.

A short menu is the strongest signal there is. A kitchen offering twelve dishes is cooking them; a kitchen offering ninety is reheating most of them. If the menu changes by day or by season, better still, because that implies buying from a market rather than a freezer.

The second signal is who is eating. A dining room with a table of people who clearly work nearby, eating at the local hour rather than the tourist hour, is doing something right. Arriving when locals arrive, usually later than visitors expect, also means you eat food cooked for a full room rather than an empty one.

Be sceptical of anyone employed to stand outside and invite you in. Restaurants that need to recruit from the pavement are competing on foot traffic, not on cooking. The same applies to menus printed in six languages with photographs of every dish.

Look at the drinks. A place with a thoughtful selection of local wine or beer, rather than only international brands, is usually run by someone who cares about the whole experience. Care tends to be consistent across a business.

Finally, if you find somewhere good, go back. Returning the next day is the single most reliable way to eat better on the second visit than the first.