You land somewhere new, you're tired, and you're hungry. Every restaurant on the map looks equally plausible and you have no idea which street is the good one. This is where most people end up at a chain across from the hotel.
You can do better in about two minutes.
If you're at a hotel, near a station, or beside a famous landmark, you are standing in the worst possible place to eat. Those areas are full of restaurants that survive entirely on people who won't walk any further and will never come back.
There's no incentive to be good. Everyone's a first-time customer and there's a fresh batch tomorrow.
Moving even five or six blocks away changes the customer base to people who live there, and businesses serving locals have to earn repeat visits. That single move does most of the work.
Search from a point a few blocks off the tourist strip instead of from where you're standing. Everything else is refinement.
In an unfamiliar city you have no local knowledge to fall back on, which makes review volume more important than usual. You want places with hundreds of reviews, not dozens.
A high rating on 20 reviews in a tourist area is a coin flip — it might be great, or it might be new and coasting on a few friendly early visits. A 4.5 built on 1,200 reviews is a place that has been consistently pleasing people for years. Take the boring, proven option.
Tap a few reviewer names. If their review history is full of places in that same city, you're reading a local. If it's a scattered trail of hotels and airports across many cities, you're reading another traveler.
Both are useful, but for different things. Locals tell you whether the food is genuinely good. Travelers tell you whether the place handles visitors well — English menus, ease of walking in without a reservation.
Searching "restaurants" in a new city gives you a soup of everything. Searching a specific dish or cuisine gives you places that specialize.
Find out what the city is known for and search that directly. Somewhere known for barbecue, search barbecue rather than dinner. The specialist doing one thing for thirty years is almost always a better bet than the place with a nine-page menu.
MyTopRate is built for exactly this situation — enter the zip of the neighborhood you want rather than where you're standing, sort by Recommended so review volume counts, and you've done the whole routine in one search.
One last thing: leave a review afterward, especially if it was good. The traveler behind you is running the same search you just ran, and the whole system only works because people bother.