Google Maps can become your best ally for find the best restaurants when you are on vacation in a town you do not know or when you are tired of going to eat in the same places and want to discover new places.

If you want to learn how to squeeze the recommendations and search of Google Maps do not miss our selection of nine tips and tricks to discover the best restaurants with Google Maps.

Manage your zones

To discover new places around us, the best thing to do is manage your zones to tell Google Maps where you usually go to go out to eat and dine away from home. For this we only have to go to Settings > Manage your zones and add the areas that interest you and those that do not interest you. Once this is done, Google Maps can send us notifications if it detects that there is a new very popular site in one of our areas.

Manage your food preferences

To improve the recommendations we can customize them from Settings > Manage your preferences. There we can configure our type of feeding in case we are vegans, vegetarians, celiacs, etc… In the section ‘I’m interested’ or ‘I’m not interested’ can you say the theme or type of food that you like (Chinese food, Mexican food, hamburger restaurants, etc…) as well as the sites that interest you or not. It is also important always rate sites to which you have gone

Check the affinity

By setting the themes and sites you like you will have configured your affinity. That means that when you perform a search on Google Maps you will be able to see in the file of each site a percentage with the probability that you like that sitebased on other similar sites that you have liked by rating them and because they fit the type of food you like.

Use the filters to refine your search

When looking for food places, Google Maps offers us some filters very practical, since they allow us to order by personal match, filter by price, by type of cuisine or by rating. So we can leave out all those sites that are out of our budget or that are closed at that time.

Find the restaurants that make your favorite food dish

Google Maps, in addition to allowing you to search for restaurants by type of cuisine, also allows look for food dishes just by typing your name in the search engine. Google Maps will show all those places where your menu or reviews mention that dish of food.

Search the reviews

In Google Maps you can also search within local reviews. For this you have to go to Reviews and in the section ‘Users often mention’ display all labels to show the magnifying glass. By touching the search icon you will be able to search the reviews to discover the opinions that there are about a certain dish, prices or any topic that you want to see their opinion.

Find out the best time to go

If you don’t like queuing when you go out for lunch or dinner, you can ask before going the rush hours. This graph is located in the tab Summary of the file of the site, and there we will see for each day of the week the busiest hours.

Discover its most popular dishes and its menu

If it is the first time that you are going to go to a site, you can consult its popular dishes to find out what people most often ask for. This information is found in the tab Menu > Featured. There we also have the section for see the menu of the restaurant, with direct access to the restaurant menu or photographs of the menu taken by users.

Check the recommendations

Finally, to discover more recommendations from Google Maps we can click on the tab To explore to see the latest news in our area along with personalized recommendations. There we will see reviews of users related to us with sites that we might like.

In Engadget Android | How to see the busiest areas of a city with Google Maps for Android