Tripadvisor

An opinion:

Many of the food people - chefs, bloggers, reviewers, restaurateurs etc I follow on social media are real Tripadvisor haters - I understand this, especially for a chef or restaurateur whose livelihood may depend on it.  I can also see it from the pov of a food blogger as they may feel that they are an arbiter of taste and it should be left to  an aggregation of genuine travellers, amateur gourmands, trolls, people with agendas, people of dubious taste etc

However I would really like to stick up for Tripadvisor, with some caveats, as a resource for looking up things to do and / or places to stay around the world it is a great start point.  I will re-iterate this for food, which would be my main use - it is a start - with caveats...
Obviously I like to travel and I love new places, even in cities I go to a lot, like Madrid, Malaga and Düsseldorf or even Dublin  (I don't think Tripadvisor is as good for USA visits) so I'm always on the look out for good / great food at a good price.  I also use Michelin guide, Zagat in USA, coupled with Google Maps to see where the places are in relation to others, where we are staying and public transport, as well as the websites (sometimes FB pages) of the bars and restaurants to get a shortlist

Caveats:
The search function is and always has been rubbish, search for a place with tripadvisor or use the site:tripadvisor.ie restaurant_name in Google to get the page on TA

Pop-ups, pop-unders, emails - far too much of that and I have aggressive ad-block , no-script etc, must be appalling on a vanilla browser.  Also they are always trying to sell hotel room - (a) I never book hotels, San does that (b) she doesn't use TA, as it is not the best value.

Don't take the ranking too seriously, think about where it is, likely clientele and size of area.

A couple of examples - A friend of mine who is foodie, won't use TA because he was in either the Canaries or Costa del Sol, and went to the top rated pub / restaurant, as it had great reviews.  It was a good family friendly English / Irish pub grub place - he hated it, but he would never normally go to a place like that, he just assumed that the top 10 in TA would all be Fine Dining, not the pubs fault, just his misunderstanding, he didn't leave a review, but if he had it would have been v negative.

Nerja - I go a lot and the top 10 in TA changes frequently, but as 60-80% of the population are tourists in any given season, they will skew results, their demography is Northern European, working - middle class, so one has to take a long view and filter out the types of places you are not interested in.

Going to places without many reviews - Maputo is a good example, only 150 restaurants in total for a population of well over 1M (Boston population 600k 2,500 restaurants on TA), Maputo TA reviewers are likely to be ex-pat, NGO, GO - so sports bars are a big hit....

There is no single truth anywhere, especially on the internet, but I do think TA is a valuable resource along with other and your common sense :)

I have posted reviews on TA, I think San does way more, but I'm lazy and I can never remember names of places or what I ate / drank so I'm not a great reviewer - and I love offal so a plate of molejas in La Oreja de Jamie or zarajos over the road in Casa Toni (both Madrid) are manna for me, but not the place for San or most others