today
inside the US, people choose restaurants by ambience or theme or status rather than for its food – and a lot of the Western world follows this pattern – rather, while traveling, I find the old adage of “eat where the locals eat” to be a far more useful metric than following the “in crowd” – yes, it will result in street cart dishes spicier than anything you can handle in Thailand – or eating parts of an animal that you are completely unfamiliar with (laab made buffalo bile) – but the end result is meals chosen for flavor not shock value or Instagram points