[Diederich]

What do you use, if you don't mind sharing?

My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is.

While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.

[kjs3]

90% of the time, I ask someone. A real person. Apps are probably never going to be the answer unless something drastic changes, because the app developers have proven over and over they're more interested in maximizing revenue at all cost, not delivering me a good experience. And the "social media"/gamification of the user community is full of perverse incentives resulting in nothing you can trust.

[mrguyorama]

Try it? Go spend 20$ some time at a place that looks good. If it meets your expectations then great, otherwise go somewhere else next time.

You'll either run out of places to try, meet your novelty needs by never running out if you live in a giant city, or get enough regular places to not care anymore

[_wp3r]

I always wished Zagat had some better ground game. Their reviews are generally pretty spot on, I do wish they had better coverage.

[kjs3]

Zagat does have much better quality, but I can't imagine how they could scale it to cover more than a tiny fraction of most major cities (much less smaller communities) since it relies very much on very high quality, selected reviewers. One can dream, though.

[pomian]

TripAdvisor. Although it seems to be overloading with other functions, as time goes on.