An explosion of travel and dining apps provides more tips than ever, but the best guide may still be your nose. I don't mean just the sense of smell -- grilled meat and garlic in oil can be traitors in leading you to a good meal -- but your own "nose" for what looks like a good restaurant.
Yelp and Trip Advisor are by now so packed with rave reviews from friends and family that they are often unreliable. I found on my road trip to Santa Fe in the spring that I spent too much time trying to filter the Yelp reviews and figure out which places were actually worthwhile. In the end, I made no momentous discoveries using these apps.
On our recent trip to Rome, we used two specialized apps -- Elizabeth Minchilli's EatRome and Katie Parla's Rome. These are the work of two enterprising American women who are living in Rome and doing their best to curate that city's eateries. But what chance do they have, really, to provide a definitive or authoritative guide to Rome's 6,000+ restaurants?
The economics of app-writing clearly don't allow them to wildly sample what's out there. The user has no idea, for instance, whether they are comped the meals or pay for them, how many times they go, whether they disclose they are reviewing the place and all the other caveats of restaurant reviewing. This does not mean that they don't provide some good tips and reviews, or that you won't get your $2.95 worth for buying them, but they are not 100% reliable, and that diminishes their usefulness.
You can rely on tips from friends, colleagues, your shoe store salesman from Italy, but these are bound to be hit and miss. In our case, two tips we got from the woman who showed us around the Castello di Magione -- to Mazolino in Panicale and to Roccafiore in Todi -- were both great. My friend Paula's recommendation to go to Pierluigi in Rome was just the ticket for that first evening there. But the Settimio al Pellgrino recommended by the friend of a friend (and favorably reviewed by Minchilli) was a bum steer -- where a "quirkiness" billed as charming simply masked incompetence and mediocrity.
One of the best places we went to, in the end, was one we discovered on our own after rejecting Minchilli's tip for the Osteria dell'Ingegno. What she billed as "one of the nicest pedestrian piazzas in Rome" was a windswept passage trafficked by the mobs going from the Pantheon to the Spanish Steps where four rickety tables with paper tablecloths flapped in the breeze. This was so unappealing to us we went back to another Osteria in the Via della Guglia we had spotted on the way there, which had a modern front and a single table on a little porch outside, blessedly sheltered from sun, wind and passersby.
The Osteria Bottega Montecitorio was a shop window of sorts for a vineyard, but the food was excellent and inventive. I had an octopus salad that was tender and tasty and Andrea had a streamlined version of eggplant parmesan that was divine. She finally got an excellent rendition of pasta cacio e pepe and I had a very good pasta all'amatriciana. The red and white house wines from Montecitorio were both quite nice. There was a real tablecloth, an unintrusive but very professional service, and a bill no worse than any other. There was a Trip Advisor emblem on the window but how would I have ever selected this place by browsing through Trip Advisor? Can the emblem or consulting the review on the spot tip the scale? Perhaps, but both of us have a nose for restaurants and this one had a lot of positive signs.
Certainly we were also lucky. Another time we might pick a restaurant that looked good and had a mediocre or bad meal. But that happens when we use apps and guides as well. In fairness, we would not have discovered this place had we not been looking for the restaurant in the app.
Two other big hits in Rome -- the Piperno in the ghetto and Pollarola near our hotel -- were tips from the concierge. But the bruschetta we had at another place near the hotel and the porchetta sandwich we got from a stand at the Campo di Fiori were a combination of luck and nose, as well.
Part of the adventure of travel is serendipity -- following a tip from a new friend, following your nose, ducking down a street not on your map -- and too much reliance on apps, guides, and reviews can deprive you of that fun.
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