Where to eat?

One of the biggest problems that I encounter when traveling is were to eat? I LOVE food and going out to eat at restaurants. I would rather eat at a new restaurant than visit a museum or monument. Every new city that I travel to, I wind up walking for what seems like hours looking for a place to eat. Without being familiar with the area, two restaurants next to each other could look the same, serve the same food, but produce two dramatically different dining experiences.

Many people who travel order room service or eat in the hotel restaurant. I am not that type of person. Similarly, I don’t I like to eat at fast food chains. When I travel, I like to get the true vibe of a city by eating were the locals eat.  This is not an easy task to venture outside the city’s hotel zone and find the true local “watering holes.”

On my trip to San Diego, I decided to do something crazy: ask local people where they ate. In particular, I asked those who worked in the restaurant industry: waiters, busboys, a cook etc. Those in the food industry are 1) most likely from the area, 2) know what good food is and 3) understand the local food trends. The result was amazing. I got to try some of the best food the San Diego had to offer. I will share where I ate and the other restaurant recommendations that I did not use in my next post.

My experiment in San Diego makes me wants to try this in other cities. For this to stay fun, I decided to set some ground rules. Some of these are long standing rules that I use when I eat out and others are specific to this experiment:

1)      The first restaurant in a city can be recommended by a hotel employee, fellow blogger or website.

2)      I can only eat at restaurants that are recommended

3)      If a restaurant’s employees make no recommendation, a recommendation from fellow dinner or person on the street is acceptable.

4)      I will not eat in a restaurant with no other patrons (The two times I broke this rule, I got sick afterwards)

5)      I will not eat in restaurants with lower than a B sanitation restaurant. ( I might break this rule for a C rated restaurant, if the restaurant is full with patrons)

6)      A long wait or line to get in is no reason to move on to another restaurant.

7)      No sister restaurants – If an employee of restaurant recommends a restaurant owned by the same group, its can not be visited.

8)      Any recommendation is welcomed! From established restaurants to food trucks to vendors on the street.

9)      I can not accept free food except it is offered to the masses.

10)   Have fun!

Yes, there are a lot of rules, but rules make this more of a challenge and will force me out of my comfort zone. If I want to eat, I am going to have to strike up conversations with people I don’t know. Just writing about this experiment is making me want to book to test it out in a new city.

How do you find places to eat when in a “new” city?

 However, the fun of this experiment is meeting new people, trying new resturants and eating lots of food.