About
Most food apps give you endless recs. Locals tells you where to go tonight.
A few months ago I was traveling through Asia, trying to find good places to eat. Google, Yelp, Instagram, TikTok: every restaurant had nearly the same rating, and nothing told me which ones were actually worth going to.
Back in New York, it was the same problem with more apps. Beli, Google Maps, TikTok, whatever friends had saved. I never had too few options. I’d still end up somewhere overhyped, or too expensive for what it was, because the hard part was never finding a place. It was picking one.
So Locals does the picking. Tell it what you’re in the mood for, compare a few places that are open near you, and it hands you one. Behind that are 78,000+ reviews of 384 restaurants across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, weighted toward the people who actually live here.
Hope it helps you find somewhere good tonight.
Harrison
How Locals picks
- 1Open and near youOnly places that are open right now, within the distance and price you set.
- 2Rated by people who live hereEvery review counts, but reviews from New Yorkers count more. How local a reviewer is comes from where else they review, whether they’ve reviewed here over time or in one burst, and Google Local Guide status.
- 3Checked against the hypeA model trained on 205 restaurants I rated by hand learns which places hold up and which are coasting on a reputation, and ranks the shortlist with it.
- 4Then you chooseA few rounds of this or that, between places you haven’t been, until there’s one left. That’s where you’re going.
Where locals and visitors disagree
Yopcity Restaurant
Belmont · American
4.5locals4.1tourists
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