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We mentioned that if a menu feels a tad too familiar, you might just be in a tourist trap. Well, same goes for the clientele. That’s why Kizilbayir keeps his distance from restaurants that specialize in serving group tours.
“It’s the circle of life: Tourists come to the city. They show the historic places, museums, gardens. They start to get hungry. Then, the tour guide takes a busload of tourists to a place that looks attractive,” he said. But, he argued, “You cannot deliver good quality food for that many people at the same time, so as a restaurateur, you have to cut corners. You make the food or drinks look ‘bombastic.’ You bring desserts with sparkly candles, play loud ‘popular music,’ have servers sing in weird outfits or hats.”
“Tourists leave these places with bad food in their stomachs, but the tour guide gets a cut of the profits. It’s an easy turn,” he admitted.
But that’s why, during his travels, Hucks seeks out restaurants devoid of tourists like himself. “If you’re in a country or region that speaks a different language than your own (in this case, English), avoid places where you hear a lot of non-native chatter,” he said.
Santiago also avoids restaurants with too many other fellow tourists. “When I’m eating at a tapas restaurant in Spain, I want to hear the table next to me speaking Spanish,” he said. “I look for where the locals are.”
He confessed: “As a restaurant owner, I have a love-hate relationship with things like Google reviews, but I do find they are helpful for finding where the locals go. Are the reviews written in the local language? If I’m going to Portugal, reviews that are all in English are a red flag. I look at what people are wearing in pictures. In Europe, you dress up to go out to dinner. Seeing pictures of people in shorts and T-shirts at a ‘fancy’ restaurant in Madrid lets me know it’s not where the locals are going.”
As Premoli neatly sums up, “The main giveaway for a restaurant’s authenticity is the [local] clientele!”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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