Find The Hands-Down Best Hole-In-The-Wall Restaurants In Any City By Spotting These Clues

What is the No. 1 fantasy of any foodie? Is it to land a reservation at that legendary, Michelin-starred restaurant nearby? Is it to taste some esoteric dish not even dreamed of by Anthony Bourdain? No, it's something a little humbler: to find a great little restaurant no one else has heard of and brag about it to their friends. The first time you tell your group chat that you got the best gyro of your life from a truck stop in Omaha, you know you'll spend the rest of your life chasing that particular dragon.

But how do you reliably discover hidden gems? After all, if they were easy to find, they wouldn't be hidden, would they? And all it takes is one fawning TikTok called "POV: you just had a life-changing rogan josh experience in Portland, Maine" to send a sleepy little mom-and-pop joint into the viral stratosphere. Well, there's no one easy answer, but if you're observant and persistent, there are more than a few ways to find a diamond in the rough.

We understand that this piece of advice sounds a little obvious. You might as well tell a sailor lost at sea to use a compass. But when it comes to using the internet or social media to find new restaurants, there's a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way would be to open up TikTok or Instagram (or, heaven forbid, ChatGPT), let it spit out a few recommendations, and then blindly follow them. If the almighty algorithm has shown you an obscure little restaurant off the beaten path, chances are it's shown that same restaurant to a thousand other people, and at least a hundred of them are waiting in line for a table right this very second.

Search engines may have become harder to use in recent years, but they can be your friend when it comes to finding restaurants. Whether you browse one of the many websites devoted to rating restaurants or find a handy subreddit to guide you, you'll be searching proactively, not just passively letting information come to you. (Of course, these are the same sources AI chatbots scrape for information, but you'll be getting it from the horse's mouth, free from the hallucinations that would make it, say, tell you to eat a poisonous mushroom.)

If you're someplace unfamiliar, or if you're trying to get to know your local food scene better, it's a good idea to solicit opinions from people who live or work in the area. But as that one episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with Bill Hader demonstrated, you might get answers that are affected by, erm, outside considerations. If you really want to know what's what, you'll want to ask people in the food industry. After all, the people who work in your favorite restaurants are humans, too, and they have to eat somewhere. Where do they go when they're not wearing aprons?

That's a sensible enough suggestion, but what if you don't know anyone in the food industry? Should you just accost anyone smoking a cigarette within the general vicinity of a bistro? A better idea would be to find a local farmer's market and pick the brains of the vendors. These people are not only passionate about food, but may also very well supply some of the best restaurants in the area. And even if you don't get a good answer, you can walk away with a nice sample of burrata (which is a kind of mozzarella).

When you're preparing to go out, the modern tendency is to plan every bit of it in advance. It used to be the case that people would go to the movie theater on a given day without even having a specific movie in mind; today, showings of hotly anticipated films may sell out a year in advance. This same habit has carried over to restaurants, too, and for much the same reason: If you're going to be spending entirely too much money on an evening out, you want to know ahead of time that it's worth it, right?

But there's something to be said for spontaneity, too. If you're in an unfamiliar city and you're not sure where you want to eat, why not take a walk and see what storefronts or menus catch your eye? (If you're in a city designed for cars rather than people — Los Angeles, say, or Atlanta —  you can drive around as needed.) It's often the case that a truly great restaurant will look like just one eatery out of many — the only way to know for sure is to try it for yourself. You may even end up with a new place to hit up every time you're in town.

You may have heard some tips about how to find the best, most authentic restaurants in a given area based on context clues. For instance, some will suggest that you look for restaurants that have a handwritten list of specials; if you're looking for a certain type of cuisine, others urge you to find a restaurant near a grocery store specializing in that same cuisine. These are solid pieces of advice, but you'll also find that they're hardly foolproof.

Unfortunately, it's entirely possible that you'll go to the Chinatown of a given city, visit a hole-in-the-wall restaurant frequented by locals, marvel at the list of specials written in Cantonese, and still end up with an underwhelming plate of char siu pork belly. It could be that a restaurant is popular for reasons that have nothing to do with the food; it could be that the restaurant specializes in a different dish, or it wasn't to your personal taste. Whatever the case, it's important to know that there is no One Weird Trick that will let you divine the good restaurants from the bad.

If you're serious about finding under-the-radar places to eat, you're going to learn a lesson that is depressing at first glance but ultimately liberating. Namely: Most restaurants are really not that special. If you happen upon an out-of-the-way diner whose name you never saw in your research, it's entirely possible that it'll be a hidden gem run by a passionate proprietor serving comfort food made with care. It's also possible — perhaps even probable — that it will be a serviceable but undistinguished greasy spoon that dips whatever they ordered from Sysco in frying oil and calls it a day.

That sounds like kind of a bummer, especially if you just ate there. (Maybe if you ate at Waffle House, with its delicious scrambled eggs cooked in shortening oil, you'd feel better.) But there are worse things in the world than a plate of mediocre corned beef hash. Maybe you leave with a lighter wallet and a slight grease hangover, but it's ultimately no skin off your back. All it means is that when you happen upon a restaurant that really goes above and beyond, you'll treasure it even more.