which website is best reference for restaurants Yelp, Trip Adv, Eater, Google Map, blogs or another

One thing I like to do for restaurants in Italy is to use TripAdvisor but then check to see how the reviews in Italian break down. Also, the higher %age of reviews in Italian compared to English can be a good way to make it less likely you stumble into a tourist trap.

Often the hotel could be the best reference. I tend to ask a lot of locals where their favorite restaurant is. Not a big fan of web sites reviews since they can be manipulated so easily as to be of marginal value.

We ask friends who have traveled there and then ask locals once we arrive.

Checking TA reviews in Italian is definitely a good idea. So is asking locals. I enjoy a good cup of coffee and visit multiple cafes per day. I always ask the baristas for eatery rec's. To my mind, Eater.com is not useful because this is funded by/affiliated with big-$ venture capital firms. They recommend restaurants owned by themselves or their friends. Their list of "must go" places in SF is laughable. Yelp is dying, but it doesn't hurt to try. Google Maps is pretty good, esp. if you seek reviews in Italian and those written by Local Experts in the area. MInd you, I earn a Local Expert badge in San Francisco and San Jose, and yet my reviews for foreign places still show my badge. GM doesn't indicate clearly which city I am an expert of. You will need to do some digging.

I guess there is no single easy method to find good restaurants. You'll need to triangulate. This is the fun (or frustrating) part of travel planning.

I've used Michael's method as well.

Some of our more disappointing restaurant experiences were recommendations by locals! Just because someone is local doesn't necessarily mean what they like will taste good to you too? For instance, we have lovely friends who SWEAR by a local Italian place that's one small step up from Chef Boyardee. They're such nice people but I sure hope they're not advising many out-of-town diners! 😉

Look at food blogs for the cities you’ll be visiting.

And ask the taxi drivers.

As others have mentioned, some of our "tried & true" recommendations come from friends, relatives, food blogs, and especially RS Forum contributors! I find it fun to peruse menus ahead of time. Unfortunately I haven't been to Bologna, Padua or Varenna yet! I recall seeing Varenna restaurants mentioned on the Forum. Perhaps someone will chime in.
Buon Appetito!

I use TripAdvisor for hotels, but I generally ignore TripAdvisor reviews when it comes to restaurants. I know that in my home town, the highest TripAdvisor rankings go to the restaurants in the most touristed areas, and the BBQ places most popular with tourists.

Yelp reviews seem to be more the province of locals.

TripAdvisor or Google, look at the reviews in Italian. Yelp doesn't exist here, so don't pay attention to that, hotels normally get kickbacks for any client sent to a hotel especially 4 and 5 stars. Normally places are still good, but not a place they would go to.

Here's our system. Works for us to find the kind of place we like in Italy.

1. Type of place. Small, local, either a family business or is run like one, an osteria or trattoria or a street food place is usually more our style than a restaurant (but in what the place CALLS itself there are many exceptions both ways).

2. Service. Unfussy and informal is our preference, with the servers and owners treating you in a normal human way rather than in an obviously professional way.

3. Décor. We like casual and idiosyncratic (perhaps personal to the owner like decorated with his or her own paintings) rather than arty or stylish or super-modern décor (but there have been surprising exceptions to this!) Paper placemats can be a good sign. Small tables close together can be a good sign.

4. Menu. Check out the restaurant's website or walk by the place and look at the menu. We look for an interesting but very short and seasonal menu, consistently careful about the food. A long, long menu is a warning sign. Remember to order what the restaurant does well instead of something on the menu that is not their specialty, like, say, pizza in a seafood restaurant or vice versa. It's not necessarily bad if the menu has English translations.

5. Antipasti and pasta. Look for good antipasti especially the house antipasti, especially in Puglia and Emilia-Romagna. House-made or at least hand-made fresh pasta is our favorite but there is plenty of good pasta that isn't.

6. Reviews. On Tripadvisor, etc., we look for the ratings and reviews by both Italians and non-Italians. It can be instructive to compare the two. Obviously, it's good to see very few "terrible" reviews, but we read ALL the "terrible" reviews to see what the problem was --- these are often hilariously easy to discount, like "The place was crowded and we had to sit next to the bathroom" or "They wouldn't let me bring my dog." We like to see reviews weighted towards "excellent" rather than "very good," a manager who responds to a review, but isn't excessive in arguing back.

We tend to disregard bad reviews from the same town and also disregard reviewers (good or bad) with only that one review. We don't pay much attention to whether reviewers think the value ratio is good or not. We look at the photos of the food ("How much does the kitchen play with the food?" is a big question for us --- we want to EAT it not exclaim over how pretty or stacked in architectural towers or squirted with squiggles it is). Remember that a popular Irish pub in an Italian town can be #1 on TripAdvisor, while the small, local, excellent osteria on a side street is #37.

1. Recommendations from food writers or bloggers or guidebooks. These may or may not be what we want, or may be way out of date. But we read them and try to compare the writers' criteria to our own.

2. Recommendations from your rental or B&B hosts (or any local person). These may or may not be the kind of place we like to eat ---- it's a little hard to describe (even in fairly decent Italian) the kind of restaurant we are looking for, and, like us in our own home town, people have favorite places to eat for all kinds of reasons including that a family member owns it or the cook makes one single dish better than anybody else.

3. Dessert. We often don't order the dessert --- it tends to be less special and less local, and we tend to prefer getting gelato from a great gelato place later on. Maybe just a small cookie of some sort and a digestivo and/or an espresso.

4. We are prejudiced against places with a view or that are in full sight of anything heavily touristed or on a heavily touristed piazza. I am not fond of places with music, although we ate very well in a restaurant in Piemonte with loud, American, secular Christmas music (e.g. "I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus.")

Thank you very much for the great ideas.
I have exhausted the interne,t its endless with information and I am skeptical of some of sites and reviews.
We are staying mostly Airbnb's, so we will see what the host suggests. But I agree we all have different tastes and I have had pretty poor suggestions in the past. On a few recent trips In Italy and Greece and Spain . I didn't do well with restaurants. I was lucky to get 1 or 2 good recommendations in each city.

I found a few blogs today that are from Italian hosts that write about Bologna an Padva, they seem promising.
we will be in the following places. I hope to find a few good options in each city to enjoy..
Bologna for 5 nights
Padua for 5 nights and
Milan for 1 night
Varenna, Lake Como for 3 nights
Lugano for 3 nights
Colmar, France for 4 nights and
Paris France for 7 nights.

Thanks

Greg

I'm a big fan of Eater, they do a great job here in NYC. I also look for restaurants mentioned in articles found during my research for a particular place. The writer will mention restaurants where they ate, and I'll try to find out more about those, which sends to me to sites like culturetrip.com and similar. And also local food blogs. We were in Bologna last year and hit up a few of the restaurants mentioned on Eater. We were glad we did.

Our favorite restaurant in Bologna was Osteria Broccaindosso. You need a reservation --- we would have eaten there more than the twice we did, but it was packed even on a weeknight in December. I'm sure there are little places like this all over Bologna, but this one was in our neighborhood.

Some of our more disappointing restaurant experiences were recommendations by locals!

Well, I suppose if you asked the typical "man in the street" in my town where to go you would get a lot of "Olive Garden", "Applebee's", and maybe McDonald's for hamburgers; basically popular places everyone knows. The elusive small restaurant ran by Mom won't hit the radar very often.

I like Google maps for turning up restaurants in the area where I will be, from there I try to go to the website to get a sense of the place, but many small places still do not have websites, I pay little attention to the reviews though. I do searches restaurants in a town as well, some times adding "best", "budget", type of place, or any number of modifiers. What I am looking for are recent articles from travel writers, have found some good articles from UK newspapers and sites, I always like when TimeOut articles come up. I also consider recommendations/reviews in guidebooks, but usually the ones that are noted as smaller, casual, unique...not the three star places.

All that though is just background, get a sense of the food scene, maybe a short list of possibilities, but nothing beats a walk by to look at a menu, see the crowd (or lack thereof), get a sense of the place.

Just got back from our first trip to Rome a couple of weeks ago.

We did get some recommendations on places to eat on this and another forum but to be honest, we weren't going to travel across the city just to eat someplace so I used a combination of Google Maps and Tripadvisor. The former to find what is close by (and they tend to have some reviews anyway) and then followed up by checking on TA. It worked pretty well for us in Rome (as well as in Prague 6 months ago)

For Paris, I like the following for food recommendations:
https://parisbymouth.com
https://www.davidlebovitz.com
https://johntalbottsparis.typepad.com

I also use this website.
https://www.ilmangione.it/ristoranti/firenze/?page=1

It’s in Italian only, so little chance that reviews are contaminated by clueless “foreigners”.

I see that most of my favorite restaurants in Florence are listed, maybe not in the same order I’d put them, but close.

My old strategy of asking construction workers or local shop salesclerks doesn’t work anymore nowadays. All construction workers and most salesclerks nowadays are immigrants from Eastern Europe or some other place in the world. Taxi drivers are a good source since they must be Italian citizens by law and are nearly always (and for generations) from the city they work (taxi licenses/medallions are basically passed from generation to generation). However don’t ask them just before going to dinner because they will suggest a place far where they have to take you for a fat taxi fare.

As a rule of thumb, if you see caesar salad on the menu, run away as fast as you can.

On a trip through the Piedmont last fall, on two occasions I typed in “Restaurants near me” into Google. It led us to the two best restaurants we found in the region.