How it works

Restaurants loved by locals and restaurants that mostly serve tourists are different animals. We tell you which one you're looking at.

For every place, we look at its most recent Google reviewers and check whether each one is local to the country or visiting. We keep the details of how we tell them apart to ourselves — what you get is the result: how many recent reviewers are locals, and how many are not.

The scores

• Local score: the average star rating given by local reviewers — the number that matters most.
• Tourist score: the average star rating given by visiting reviewers.
• Crowd split: what share of recent reviewers are locals versus visitors.
• The gap is the tell — a place tourists rate 4.6 but locals rate 3.4 is usually a place locals avoid. But a busy tourist spot that locals also rate highly is simply a great restaurant.

Reading the verdicts

• 💎 Hidden gem — mostly locals, and they rate it excellent.
• 🏠 Local favorite — the neighborhood eats here.
• 🤝 Mixed crowd — locals and visitors share the tables.
• 💖 Loved by locals & tourists — plenty of visitors, but locals rate it just as highly, so it earns its crowds.
• 🧳 Tourists' spot — visitors clearly outnumber locals.
• ⚠️ Tourist-trap warning — mostly tourists, and locals rate it clearly worse than tourists do.

Honest caveats

• A high tourist share doesn't mean bad food — some world-famous places are excellent and 90% visitors. Use it when you want to eat where locals do.
• We aim to classify at least 100 recent reviewers per place. Where fewer are available, we say the confidence is lower.
• In a few countries we can't reliably split locals from visitors; we say so instead of guessing.

Freshness

Every check is stored, so a restaurant someone already checked loads instantly. Signed-in users can re-run a check at any time to refresh the result.