How we find bars & restaurants when traveling
Hint: it's not on TripAdvisor
As we prepare for our Italian adventure, I have spent hours (days, really) planning our honeymoon. Between the interregional travel, staying in cities we have either never been to or haven’t been to in a decade, and visiting small towns with limited restaurant options, it has been an absolute beast of an undertaking.
While we like to leave reservations open and not plan every second of our trip, it’s important to have some general guidance so we don’t end up at a tourist-packed restaurant under the Colosseum. These tips aren’t unique to Italy and can be applied to all travel plans. Since I have spent months (and truly, about 10-20 hours a week) on planning, I thought I’d share how we find our restaurants prior to departure.
All of these hacks came from reverse engineering a search based on restaurants we know and love in cities we are familiar with, and figuring out how we may have come across them if we weren’t local.
Pub Crawl
No, not an actual pub (though sometimes, yes!). I’m talking about publications. I have very few that I trust, but the first thing I’ll do when planning is check Michelin. I always love to squeeze in one boujee and over the top dinner, but more than that, I think the non-starred Michelin guide is fabulous. It’s a great place to start and will be guaranteed great meals, if not totally under the radar.
The two other places I check out are Conde Nast and Vogue. I truly love CN’s travel guides and love how specific and broad they are- it helped us so much with this trip as traveling through Italy can be done so many different ways, and this really helped with narrowing it down.
The Bourdain Effect
This can be a little hit or miss, but it’s always worth looking into. We are obsessed with Anthony Bourdain and all things travel shows. We’ve re-watched Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy many times (it leaves something to be desired but generally worth watching). I also am a huge nerd and study for our trips by reading tons of books (memoirs, novels, or otherwise) and love adding any mentions to my list. Reading Under the Tuscan Sun (the movie is a true disgrace; the memoir is just stunning) is 99% of the reason we’re going to Cortona.
One of our most memorable and delectable meals in Paris came from an early 2000s Parts Unknown rec. Aside from the fact that some places may be closed by now due to time & the pandemic, there is one main thing you have to remember: the Bourdain Effect is real. Some of these teeny hole-in-the-walls are no longer teeny. They have been blown up by Tony’s episodes and may no longer reflect the restaurant he went to, but it’s always worth checking. The Bourdain Effect can happen to any popularized and overhyped restaurant; a good example is Dario Cecchini’s butcher shop. This has been on several Netflix shows and now flaunts 3k Google reviews- it’s not your Grandmother’s butcher anymore. Tl;dr: tread lightly.
A Feather in my Map
This is some next-level-searching, but it’s super effective if you’re headed to a small town or more rural area. Cities are too densely populated for this to work, unless you’re specifically looking for something close to another locale (but again, if you’re looking for a a place to grab lunch after the Roman Forum, expect a convenient location and not much else).
This was a trick I used for our stay in Tuscany- I found one of the restaurants that I am most excited for by finding a small Chianti winery via Conde Nast (the smallest producer of Chianti Classico!). I wanted us to grab lunch nearby, so I went onto the map and just zoomed in and out and scrolled all over until I found the teensiest little town with the smallest restaurant with absolutely stellar views and fabulous, though minimal, reviews. It’s a short drive from our winery and there is no chance I would have found the restaurant, let alone the town, by just searching for ‘best restaurants.’
I also use this for our travel/commuting days. We’ll be in the car from Florence to San Gimignano to Chianti to Cortona to Rome to Montepulciano and more. I mapped the directions for each drive and zoomed along the routes to find some unknown towns and adorable restaurants for us to grab lunch.
Social networking
The second our flights are booked, I’m the Screenshot queen. I even have running tabs on places we would love to go to but have absolutely no concrete plans for.
I start by paying close attention to friends and Creators who have or are traveling to the same places we are. I screenshot everything and then add it to my Notes app under the city or country’s title. I don’t even bother going through it until the plans are being finalized; this beginning phase it just about acquiring quantity, not quality.
I will also follow and ‘save’ accounts and posts of places I love. I follow about a dozen Tuscan villas and hotels that I saw people staying at over the last few years, long before I knew we’d honeymoon here.
My #1 favorite way to leverage my social network is by going through my favorite Chefs’ old posts. I will scroll for far too long and look at every single restaurant they posted to see where they went. Melissa Clark claims this is the best gnocchi she’s ever had? Ruth Reichel went out of her way to have lunch at this restaurant in Bologna? Say less.
Also: play into the algorithm! When I started planning Italy, I went onto TikTok and purposefully searched “Rome restaurants” or “eating like a local in Florence” or “visiting Tuscany” or “Italian honeymoon.” I have been served such great content with awesome recs since then!
Friends with benefits
This goes without saying, but asking friends for recommendations is a great place to start especially if the rest of this list is overwhelming. Everyone (including me!) thinks that their trip through Tuscany, their hotel in Paris, their restaurant picks in Mykonos, are the best of the best. Everyone is willing to share their itinerary, agenda or favorite spots. I’ll ask friends I know well and also post a question box on Instagram for people to contribute.
Feeling Googley
When it’s time to start the plans, I go through and cross-check my mass amounts of screenshot, recommendations, and lists against Google. That brings us to my next tip on how to narrow down this giant list. I won’t lie: this takes me hours to do, but it’s worth it Here are all of the things I look into when deciding a restaurant’s viability:
Does the location work for us?
What do the reviews say? How many reviews are there? (hint: too many is not good, but too few isn’t great either)
Have any publications written up the restaurant?
What’s the website look like? (I won’t go into specifics here; this is a personal preference)
Are reservations available? (sometimes we want a res to guarantee a spot; other times, if we’re going for hole-in-the-wall, I love to see restaurants only taking res by phone- your hotel can help with this prior to the trip!)