The Balance Small Business
For the individuals that enjoy experimenting with different cuisine and fine dining, there is always a strong desire for them to find their next great dining experience. Despite the plethora of restaurants available, finding the best location is not as easy as it seems, especially when you are trying to eat local food in a place you are unfamiliar with.
Robb Sterling of Denver, Colorado, is the Founder of Denver LED Company. With a strong belief in helping local businesses, Robb Sterling believes it is always important to eat in local restaurants rather than opting for a larger chain every time you dine out. Furthermore, Robb Sterling shares his thoughts on how advocates of fine diningshould go about seeking out new local dining establishments.
Why Is eating locally so important?
First and foremost, I believe that eating locally is one of the best ways to get a genuine food experience these days. It’s also a more exciting experience. When you’re searching high and low for a local place to eat, you never know what you might find, whether it’s closer to being more traditional, something radically different, or somewhere in-between.
Franchise restaurants aren’t able to offer you the same level of excitement. The reality is, if you want to eat at franchise establishments, you can do that anywhere in the world. Local food will always be the unique meals that you simply can’t have anywhere else, and I’d argue that whenever you choose not to eat local, you’re missing out on potential fine dining experiences.
It’s also not just about what the customer experiences on their end, either. Eating locally is also a great way to lend your support to restaurants competing with better-known franchises, and it’s no big secret that this can be an uphill battle sometimes.
As a fine diner, do you consider yourself part of a community?
Absolutely. Whether it’s my fellow fine dining enthusiasts or the wonderful people who prepare and serve the meals I eat at a local establishment, we’re all in this together, and we can all assist one another in this process.
How Is this community helpful towards finding a new place to eat?
On the one hand, I can use means such as social media to connect with other food enthusiasts all around the world. This allows us to communicate with one another to make recommendations. This insight is impeccably useful, simply because it means that I don’t have to be flying blind when I’m trying to figure out where I want to eat. It also means that I can use the knowledge of my own food experiences to help others out to the same degree. All of this communication is fueled by our passion in the pursuit of the perfect meal.
On the other hand, sometimes the best recommendations can come from the restaurants themselves, not the reviewers. Whenever I’m eating out locally, I always make sure to ask my servers and the chefs about their favorite places to eat out. Fine dining is an experience, and everyone gets their inspiration from somewhere. This is also another way that the community shows its support, with restaurants recommending their customers to one another.
How essential are good communication skills for fine diners?
They are arguably the single most important skill to have if you are planning on going out and about, seeking new places to eat that are further and further from where you usually go. The further you travel, the more you’ll need to be able to communicate with others in order to keep yourself moving in the right direction. What’s more, I think every fine dining enthusiast has a responsibility of sorts to help others out whenever they can with their recommendations and know-how, and this also means a strong emphasis on being able to communicate everything quickly and concisely.
How do you find good local restaurants?
The answer to this question is surprisingly straightforward. Whenever I’m feeling like a fish out of water trying to find a local place to eat and for whatever reason I’m not able to lean on my usual channels of support, the answer is actually right in front of me. The best people to ask about where to eat locally are the locals themselves. They’ll have exactly the know-how I need, being able to pinpoint exactly where I should go based on whatever kind of fine diningexperience I’m feeling like having on that particular day. It might be a little bit more difficult to converse with strangers as opposed to people I know, but a shared passion for food is a very useful tool to help break the ice. You also never know when you might just make a new friend in the process!
How reliable are reviews when it comes to finding a good place to eat locally?
I would say simply to proceed with caution. While it’s true that, as an individual that enjoys fine dining, you’ll want to conduct research from the greatest variety of sources as possible, formal reviews included, it’s important to keep in mind that nowadays these reviews tend to be a little less objective than before. It’s not to say that they aren’t useful, or being completely deceptive; rather, it’s more about the fact that you don’t know what the agenda is of the person who has written the review.
If you were deciding between a review by someone that you’ve never met in person or communicated with directly, or a trusted friend of yours that you have open communication with as well as established trust, it’s pretty obvious which one you would decide to go with. Word-of-mouth is the way to go, and I believe that even if someone isn’t able to put their food-related opinions into words as eloquently as a reviewer, it still ends up being more trustworthy more often than not.
Are there any other tips for finding new local places to eat?
The first tip I have is on the unconventional side, but it’s been wonderfully helpful to me over the years. Use your sense of smell. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in situations where you can’t even get help from the locals to find yourself somewhere to eat. In these rare cases, I’ve found that if all else fails, my nose is a powerful tool to track down the best restaurants. One of the best things about food is the simplicity of it. If it smells good, it’s going to taste good! As soon as I’ve locked in on a sensational smell, I start heading in that direction. My nose has yet to let me down in this regard.
