Although large-scale chain restaurants certainly have their place, they can get boring after a while. If you are craving a good, authentic Italian or Chinese dish or if you are craving the atmosphere and food from a hometown diner-style restaurant, you might be wondering where you should head to get a good meal.

Finding under-the-radar local dining can be tricky. Scanning through the phone book might give you some ideas, but many of these restaurants are hit and miss, and you certainly do not want to spend a fortune taking your family to a local restaurant that is less than stellar. However, there is no reason to give up on your idea of finding fine local dining that isn’t part of a major chain.

Instead of trying and failing, you should consider checking out Yelp for advice and reviews about small, under the radar restaurants in your area. Yelp not only details the information about large restaurants, but the site can also be very useful for finding hidden local gems.

First of all, head to your city’s section on the Yelp page — you might be surprised to find that even small towns are typically covered on the website. You can then take a look at the top restaurants in the area — this listing might give you some ideas that you have never thought of.

If you do not see anything that stands out to you on this list, continue searching. It might take a few minutes to find the hidden gems in your area, but it is well worth the search. Take note of a few restaurants that look appealing to you, and make a point to look for restaurants that you have never heard of or perhaps that you don’t know much about.

You can then open up the pages for each restaurant in a separate browser tab in order to make a proper comparison of each restaurant that you find. Yelp will give you all of the information that you need about the restaurant in question — for instance, you can find out about hours of operation, the dress that is expected, the price range and more.

The best part about using Yelp to find these small restaurants is the ability to read the reviews. You can read reviews from other users who have visited the restaurant, which will give you an idea of if you should check out the restaurant or not, and you might even find a few suggestions for the food as well.

This article was written by ezCater.com. For more information visit www.ezcater.com.