Eating Like a Local: A No-BS Guide to Finding Great Food Abroad

The phrase "eating like a local" has been used to sell so many mediocre food tours that it's almost meaningless now. But the underlying idea is sound: the best food in any city is usually what the people who live there are eating, which is almost never what's been curated for tourists.

Here's how to actually find it.

Why TripAdvisor's top 10 fails you

Review platforms optimize for the reviews they get, not for the full picture of a city's food scene. The people most likely to leave reviews on TripAdvisor are English-speaking tourists. So TripAdvisor's top-rated restaurants in any city are heavily weighted toward the restaurants that English-speaking tourists found and liked — which is a reasonably strong signal for "good for tourists," not for "what the city is actually known for."

The local ramen shop that's been there for 40 years with no English menu and no reason to set up a TripAdvisor listing is invisible to this system. The tourist-facing restaurant with four staff members dedicated to managing online reputation is very visible to it.

This isn't TripAdvisor's fault. It's a structural limitation of how reviews work. The solution is to use a different signal.

The signals that actually work

Queue at meal time with local customers in it

Not a queue of tourists — a queue of people who look like they live in that neighborhood, waiting at noon or 7pm for a table. That queue is a real-world recommendation from people with options. They could eat anywhere nearby. They chose this place. That's more useful than any rating.

This is especially reliable in Asian cities. The ramen shop in Tokyo with a queue of salarymen at lunchtime is almost certainly excellent. The one next door with a photo menu in three languages and empty seats is almost certainly not.

Ask someone who works nearby, not where they'd send a tourist

The question most travelers ask is "where should I eat?" The better question is "where do you eat?" or "where do you go for lunch around here?" The distinction matters. The first question puts the person in the role of tour guide and they'll suggest something they think you'll like. The second question asks them as a person, and they'll tell you where they actually go.

The barista at your morning coffee shop, the person at the dry cleaner on the corner, anyone who works in a non-tourist shop in the neighborhood — ask them where they eat. Not the hotel concierge, who often has referral relationships with restaurants they recommend.

Markets and covered food halls, specifically the sections not facing the entrance

Tourist-facing food markets are designed around the first impression — beautiful produce stalls and photogenic displays near the entrance. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to find the stalls and counters where locals actually eat. La Boqueria in Barcelona is a tourist market at the entrance and a genuinely functional food market 50 meters further back. The same principle applies to most covered markets in Europe and Asia.

Google Maps reviews in the local language

This is underused. On Google Maps, filter reviews by language. If a restaurant has 400 reviews in English and 12 in the local language, the local review count is a better signal of whether locals use it. If it has 200 reviews in Spanish (for a restaurant in Madrid) and 30 in English, locals are clearly going there — that's worth a lot more than the reverse.

You don't need to read the local-language reviews. You just need to look at whether they exist in meaningful numbers.

The lunch crowd on a weekday

Lunch on a weekday is the most reliable test in any city. Tourist restaurants stay busy because tourists eat on tourist schedules (which don't vary much by day). A local restaurant that fills up at lunch on a Tuesday is filling up with people who work nearby and have come back repeatedly. That's the restaurant you want.

Some of the best meals I've had traveling have been at places I found by walking into a residential neighborhood at 12:30pm and going into whichever restaurant had the most people eating inside who looked like they were on a lunch break from a job down the street.

Adapting by region

Europe

In most of Western Europe, the tourist-facing restaurants are clustered tightly around landmarks and popular squares. Walk out of the tourist zone — usually no more than five minutes — and the quality and value shift noticeably. In Italy and Spain specifically, meal times are later than most tourists expect (lunch 2–3pm, dinner 9–10pm). Showing up at the local mealtime is a reliable signal that you're in a real restaurant rather than one optimized for tourists who eat on American schedules.

Asia

In much of East and Southeast Asia, the best food is often in places that would fail every Western health code inspection on first glance: plastic stools at folding tables, fluorescent lighting, no English menu, full of people eating quickly and leaving. Don't let the aesthetics mislead you. A street food stall in Bangkok or Taipei that's been at the same corner for 30 years is operating on reputation alone. That's a very good sign.

Latin America

The set lunch (almuerzo in Spanish, prato feito in Brazil) is the best value meal in most of Latin America. A soup, a main, and sometimes a drink for $3–8, served at lunchtime, often at places that don't have a dinner menu. If you walk into a neighborhood restaurant at 12:30pm and they hand you a laminated card with the day's set menu, you're in the right place.

A word on "authenticity"

The goal isn't to eat in the most obscure or "authentic" place you can find — it's to eat good food that reflects where you are. Sometimes that's a Michelin-starred restaurant. Sometimes it's a bowl of noodles from a market stall. The point is to not spend your limited time and food budget on places that exist because you walked past them, rather than because they're worth your time.

The question to ask at any restaurant before you sit down: "Would this place still be here if tourists stopped coming?" If yes, you're probably in the right place.

Read next: How to spot tourist traps before they cost you — the full guide to identifying when you're about to be overcharged.