This might not be helpful, but I decided to rely on serendipity. Sometimes I feel like we think too much about finding the best of the 'best' and we rely on expert opinions of the crowd instead of taking a chance ourselves and trying out new things.
When Im traveling out of the country, I just walk around at meal time until I find a spot with locals waiting in line out the door. Hop in line, watch what the people ahead of you order, and then get the same. Every once and a while I'll get something that I don't enjoy, but 8/10 times you end up with super tasty food you may not have otherwise tried.
I typically use the reviews you get from Google. No review site is flawless, they all have fake or bogus comments. I just look for patterns. For example, I was recently debating on going to a recently opened Asian restaurant so I looked at the google reviews. A majority of the negative reviews pointed out the same flaws, that to go orders were often wrong, dine in food often came out cold/nasty, and the sole manager that handles day to day operations generally refused to help anyone that had an issue. It wasn't just "The manager sucks", it was detailed accounts of how horrible of a person this manager was and how she routinely screwed over customers. I decided not to go. There were some good reviews too, but knowing my luck I didn't want to chance having an issue and needing to deal with this manager.
I don't rely on the rankings to find the "best" I just use reviews as a basic litmus test if it is terrible or not. I am basically just looking to avoid getting food poisoning or eating somewhere with terrible service, stuff like that -- I'll try most everything at least once. You have to be pretty consistently terrible to have something like under 3 stars, so that's my cutoff.
You seem like a perfect early user for our new social places recommendation app bibimapp.com . We're trying to create an viable alternative to crowd sourced averages which allows people to discover niche and personally meaningful places and experiences. Google places and yelp are consolidation funnels and it's ruinning how we experience the world.
my personal method when out and about is "ask a stranger," with using my hand computer as a backup. i delight in answering these questions as well, so i'm inclined to believe people generally don't mind.
I travel a lot and talk to a lot of people and I can tell you from my experience that a lot of people don't know the best restaurants in their town. Most people haven't eaten at all of them to make the comparison. The best way to find out is to have some way to ask a bunch of people then compare their collective results and see what everyone's experience adds up to. That quickly starts looking a lot like Yelp.
I travel a lot, and I never ask for the 'best' place to eat. What you ask is very, very important. I always ask what their favorite place to eat is. That is a different result.
What I've noticed is if you ask a random stranger what the 'best' is, you get the same generic, expensive fusion something made into a paste cuisine. If you ask their favorite, you find small, off-the-wall places with terrible selection, but amazing food.
