How to Identify a Must-Visit Restaurant Before Making a Reservation

For some of us, the process of researching, choosing, and booking a restaurant is an anticipation-filled preview of the meal to come. For others, it feels like you can’t trust the information available online, and the restaurants you end up booking are just as likely to provide an unforgettable experience — that you’d rather forget. Fake reviews, dodgy photos, and out-of-date information can make it feel like you’re rolling the dice when booking a restaurant. While there’s no guarantee you’ll love a certain restaurant, there are plenty of indicators to look out for that will help you spot which restaurants are reservation-worthy and which are worth steering clear of.

As a trained chef who likes to dine out at new and different restaurants regularly, I’ve seen what restaurants promise and what they really offer from both sides. In this article, I’ll share some practical tips to help you step up your restaurant research game, allowing you to efficiently sort the restaurants you’re most likely to enjoy from those you’re less likely to have a good experience at. However, before we get started, it’s important to note that one person’s dream restaurant could be blacklist-worthy for someone else. Quality is subjective, and your expectations should take your budget into account, as well as your location. Nonetheless, with these tips, you should be well-equipped to make a well-informed decision about whether to book a restaurant or not.

When researching a restaurant, you’re likely to come into contact with some online reviews of the establishment. Some reviews (either professional or from members of the public) may be on the restaurant’s website, but the vast majority will be on review platforms like Yelp or Google. Take reviews on a restaurant website with a pinch of salt, as they’ve been cherry-picked to reflect the establishment in the best possible light and are unlikely to be reflective of a typical dining experience there.

When looking on review websites, you’ll usually see some summary information, such as an average customer rating, the number of reviews, an approximate price range, and opening hours. But the average rating can be deceptive: Some restaurants will pay shady companies to supply a stream of fake reviews to boost both the rating and the number of reviews. Additionally, a restaurant can sometimes set its own price range indication on review sites, making the restaurant appear more affordable than it really is. Even the highlighted photos on a restaurant’s Yelp or Google profile may have been shot or selected by the restaurant itself, showing picture-perfect food that’s better than reality. To avoid these issues, dig deeper into the reviews: Be suspicious if the reviewers are all influencers (or you’ve only heard of a place via social media influencers), check what customers leaving bad reviews say, and look out for mentions of star dishes!

You can take researching reviews even further. Beyond the average rating, try filtering reviews to show the most recent reviews first. An acclaimed restaurant can have a run of poor form, and a once terrible restaurant can achieve new highs, so checking the latest reviews will give you a better indication of what you can expect if you’re planning to eat there soon. If reviews include photos, that’s even better: Use these to see what the food’s like from the customer’s perspective. Just remember that if you can only see glowingly positive reviews, or if some particularly positive reviews seem to contradict more measured responses from the majority or reviewers, it may be a sign that these reviews are fake or were submitted by influencers, friends of the restaurant, or people given free food in exchange for leaving a positive review.

Additionally, it can be worthwhile looking through reviews to spot trends. Google provides a handy tool that identifies keywords or phrases frequently repeated in customer reviews. A phrase like “quality seafood” is likely a good sign, while repeated mention of food poisoning should ring alarm bells for obvious reasons. For repeated mentions of a specific dish, check individual reviews mentioning the dish to see if the repeated sentiment is positive or negative.

Continuing with online reviews, it’s not just what customers have posted online that matters, but how a restaurant responds to the feedback. This is important when it comes to negative reviews with specific and detailed criticism. Ideally, a restaurant will respond to criticism with professionalism and politeness rather than denial and hostility. This indicates that the restaurant is committed to improving for future customers. You may see a restaurant responding to customer reviews with an offer to make things right with a refund or an invitation to return to the restaurant again. However, doing this publicly in response to a review can encourage scammers to blackmail restaurants with unfairly negative reviews in order to get some form of compensation, so don’t be suspicious if a restaurant responds to a negative review with a short message asking the customer to get in touch via a private channel like email or phone.

Most importantly, you should check negative reviews to see whether the same issues are recurring. If this is the case, has the restaurant responded to say it’s doing something about the problem? If not, there may be cause for concern. However, some restaurants don’t have trained staff to respond to reviews or don’t engage with any online reviews as policy, as it can cause more harm than good if handled poorly. A restaurant’s response to reviews can give you an indication of professionalism, but it’s no guarantee of quality.

It’s said that a picture tells a thousand words, and this is true when checking previous customers’ experiences at a restaurant. Customer photos offer a visual portal to another diner’s experience, and for most restaurants, they’re easy to find online. Previous customers will often include photos of the restaurant and the food they ate there in online reviews on sites like Yelp and Google, but social media platforms are another great way to find photos from previous diners. For example, on Instagram, it’s relatively straightforward to see posts from all visible users who have tagged a restaurant. Head to a restaurant’s Instagram profile (if it has one), select the tagged photos tab, and you will see all the posts from other accounts tagging the restaurant. Some posts will be from influencers or other partners of the restaurant — these should be viewed as marketing rather than honest feedback. 

If there’s an abundance of photos of unpleasant-looking food or an empty restaurant on social media or review sites, perhaps steer clear. With individual food photos, check for portion size, plating, and the overall quality of the dish. With photos of the restaurant or customers themselves, do the diners look happy? Is the restaurant busy or completely empty in every photo? And is it clean and attractively decorated? These are all questions you should ask to evaluate whether a restaurant is top-notch, a tourist trap, or otherwise not worth booking a table at.

If the restaurant you’re thinking of booking a table at has a well-known chef or is a fine dining restaurant, it’s likely that there’s information available online about the chef and their style of cooking. It’s well worth Googling the name of the chef to see what’s been said about them online and find out more about their food. It’s worth doing this for a couple of reasons: Firstly, you’ll want to confirm that their style of cooking is something you or the other diners in your group are going to enjoy. If your group is vegetarian, it’s probably best to avoid a restaurant headed up by a master butcher! Or perhaps a chef specializes in sushi, but you’re not a fan of raw fish.

Secondly, looking into a chef’s background can reveal insights into the person cooking for you. If you have strong moral qualms, you may be put off by a chef who’s proudly stated their love of cooking with foie gras in a recent interview. Or perhaps they’ve been the subject of controversy over mistreating employees in the past. As someone who’s worked in numerous kitchens, I can say that I’m less likely to enjoy dining at a restaurant run by an unpleasant chef.

It’s a good idea to see if you can find a restaurant’s menu online before making a booking. Many restaurants will share their menu on their website, but bear in mind that they may not be up to date, meaning prices might be higher when you actually dine. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to be wary of excessively lengthy menus with pages of sub-sections, chef’s specials, and dishes from different cuisines or requiring lots of different skills or equipment to prepare. More often than not, this is a big red flag, indicating that a restaurant relies heavily on pre-made or frozen ingredients. However, there are some notable exceptions, like Chinese and Indian restaurants, which typically offer a wide variety of dishes thanks to specialized preparation techniques. Finally, an online menu can give insight into a restaurant’s sourcing policy. In certain restaurants like steakhouses, prices by weight may be shown on the menu, allowing you to check the value in advance by comparing it with market prices and similar restaurants.

It’s not unheard of to find online menus without the pricing. There could be a few reasons for this, and they’re not all bad news. Particularly in fine dining restaurants, an online menu might be described as a sample menu and be presented without pricing or with a sample price or guide price. In this instance, the menu you’re seeing online isn’t an exact representation of the menu you’ll see in the restaurant but an indication of the sort of menu (and perhaps prices) you can expect in their establishment. The meal you’re served may be substantially different from what’s promised online, perhaps because the chef changes it based on what’s in season. 

Conversely, you might also not see prices on menus of ultra-exclusive fine dining restaurants or restaurants with exceptionally high demand. In this case, it’s most likely because the prices are extremely high, but the restaurant has no trouble staying fully booked due to its reputation — why share the price when you know people will pay whatever is necessary to eat your food?

It’s worth noting that tourist-trap restaurants may also exclude pricing from their website, allowing them to increase prices during peak seasons or, unethically, depending on the customers they are serving. If there’s no pricing, assess the type of restaurant and make your own judgment about why it’s been omitted.

It might not necessarily be an issue if a restaurant hasn’t shared a menu on its website. Even if they haven’t, you can often find a customer’s photograph of the menu via a reviews website, which can give you some indication of what to expect. Also, a restaurant can choose not to include a menu for some valid reasons. Japanese restaurants specializing in omakase, for example, will, by definition, not provide a menu, as this style of dining involves leaving the choice of dishes up to the chef. Restaurants that pride themselves on only serving the best of seasonal produce will also sometimes avoid posting a menu, allowing maximum flexibility to choose what’s best on the day. The same is true for some of the most ambitious fine dining restaurants, which will recreate courses or entire menus each day to push boundaries and show off their ability to create exquisite food spontaneously rather than with weeks (or months) of careful planning and refining a single menu. Much like when there is no pricing visible on a menu, if there’s no menu at all, check the rest of the restaurant’s website and use your best judgment to determine why you think they haven’t shared their menu online.

While you’re checking out a restaurant’s website, one other thing worth evaluating is the quality of the website itself. Restaurants provide two things to customers: Food and a dining experience. If you’re looking for a good sign that your dining experience will be positive, a well-branded, thoughtfully designed website that is easy to navigate and has all the information and features you need to make a decision and book is a good sign. On the other hand, a confusing website, or one that is clearly out of date or has incorrect information, may be an indication that a business isn’t being managed effectively or things have gone downhill.

A restaurant’s website also gives you a good sense of what to expect from the restaurant experience. Stylish, effective websites offering a seamless user experience give you some reassurance: If the marketing and web design are taken seriously, the restaurant is trying to ensure you get a good first impression. It’s an indicator that it’s serious about providing a good hospitality experience. A beautiful restaurant brimming with personality can make the food you eat there taste better, and an attractive website will give you a heads up that the atmosphere and ambiance are taken seriously — a good sign if you’re looking for more than just good grub from a restaurant dining experience.

One of the most useful visual cues on a restaurant website to help weed out potentially sub-par establishments is the choice of photography used. If you suspect the restaurant has used stock food photography on its website, this is a big red flag: It gives you no real indication of what to expect from the restaurant’s food. What’s more, it’s a sign that the establishment hasn’t invested in food photography for its marketing, which suggests corner-cutting or even shame at the appearance of its actual food.

If you suspect that a restaurant is using stock food photography on its website but aren’t sure, you can check this easily enough by doing a reverse image search. There are various ways to do this, but it can be as simple as right-clicking on an image on a restaurant’s website, selecting “copy image address,” and pasting this into a search engine’s reverse image search function. If the same image has been used elsewhere and in places unrelated to the restaurant in question, you can be sure it’s a stock photo and should approach with caution. Even with low-cost establishments like takeaway restaurants where stock imagery is most common, seeing only stock photos is not a good sign.

While the legal requirements relating to hygiene ratings for restaurants vary substantially from country to country, if you have doubts about the professionalism and hygiene of a restaurant you’re considering making a reservation for, do some digging to find their hygiene ratings. In the United Kingdom, for example, every establishment that serves prepared food has a food hygiene rating from 0 (urgent improvement necessary) to 5 (very good), published on the Food Standards Agency website and displayed outside the establishment. There’s a similar system in New York City that grades restaurants with a letter score from A (best) to C (worst). This can be a bit deceptive as a C grade doesn’t sound all that bad, but you’ll never see a restaurant in New York with a D or F, as a C is the lowest rating a restaurant can get without it being forced to close. 

Though some restaurants publish their food hygiene rating on their website, this isn’t a legal requirement in most regions, and ratings may not be readily accessible on the governing body’s website. However, if you’re aware that restaurant hygiene ratings are a requirement in your area, and the restaurant isn’t too far out of the way, it’s worth taking a look in the window to see if they’ve posted theirs. You want to see a top grade; anything lower (or a ‘grade pending’ sign) is a sign of probably hygiene issues in the establishment.

Some final considerations when selecting a restaurant to spend your hard-earned cash. In recent years, it has become increasingly common for restaurants (particularly more expensive or exclusive establishments) to request a per-person deposit when you make a reservation. You might feel put off by a restaurant asking you to pay something before you’ve even arrived, but I wouldn’t let a reservation deposit concern you. You’ll have the deposit amount deducted from your bill when you come to pay after you’ve dined.

Reservation deposits have become more common due in part to the rise of social media: With so many recommendations from friends, influencers, and adverts, it’s all too easy to make a restaurant booking in a couple of clicks and then forget all about it or fail to show at the last minute because something else came up. Reservation deposits exist because a restaurant loses money if you don’t show up. The table is kept empty, preventing another guest from taking your place, and if a restaurant has a tasting menu, then the food prepared for your meal will be going to waste. However, the requested deposit amount per person gives a good idea of the price you should expect for your meal: Your bill will almost always be substantially more than the deposit amount, so be prepared!