Off the beaten path restaurants

It has always worked.for us to ask the people.where we are staying for.their choices. The hotel workers usually know the best places for any type of meal we want.

Pagesjaunes.fr appears to be a Yelp equivalent in France.

Check out www.tripadvisor.com and choose restaurants. Then type in restaurants Antibes, France for example, or whatever town you are going to, and it will list many choices. You can click on one that you like and read the reviews and look at the photos and even go to the restaurant website from there and see the menu. Have fun searching!

I agree with asking staff, but do not ask where to eat, ask for restaurants they eat at. When we did that we were directed away from the tourist area into a local residential area. We had a great time eating with locals. Once they got over the fact tourists were in their local place, it was great interacting with local residents.

Google maps is used a lot. Many reviews there are useless, but it does give a good indication of places to avoid - anything below a 3.9 or so is likely to disappoint.

The Michelin Restaurants website is also pretty good if you'd rather rely on professional reviews, but there are fewer listings.

Gault & Millau can be useful for finding good restaurants in an area with which you may be unfamiliar. Their website seemed to be acting up when I checked just now, but I assume they'll fix that.

thefork.com is available in at least Paris and is similar to opentable.com in the US so it has reviews and you can book through them. Not necessarily off the beaten path.

The where do you eat question to the chauffeur from the airport got us some fabulous recs for Prague.

In France in the countryside, hotel restaurants are often excellent -- there is a whole culture of independent hotel restaurants which are the big draw in a rural area. We have stayed in many kind of terrible hotels where the rooms were sort of summer camp level and the dining rooms turned out to be a lovely surprise.