My passion for good food has led me to begin this journey as a Local Guide
The area where I live is characterized by lots of small restaurants, often scattered in the
midst of kilometers of fields or located in unthinkable places between the mountains and
the hills.
Over the time these places have become known for the excellence of their dishes, the
goodness and the quality of the products they serve: in an ordinary day people travel miles
between small villages where only few souls live and suddenly they see what it looks like a
bar from the outside.
Once they enter they discover an unimaginable clean and tidy restaurant area.
You sit down and a menu arrives that makes you understand that you have probably
discovered the new El Dorado of regional cuisine and when your dish arrives you have the
confirmation and you find yourself tasting one of the best dishes of your life. Talk to the
manager and find out how many years of hard work and sacrifice have served to achieve
such excellence and you wonder how such a place can be so unknown to the majority of
people in the area.
You ask them why you don’t find them on the internet and they make you understand that
they don’t even know how to turn on a computer, that the restaurant already takes away all
the time available and being active even on social networks becomes unthinkable for
them, especially if they have children who have not followed their footprints or if they are
alone.
Often it is a family-run business where an 80-year-old grandmother does not lack to serve
the dish at your table … but what a dish!
As a developer, I know perfectly well how technology has galloped over the past few
decades, leaving an entire generation of restaurateurs and asset managers in general
struggling to keep up with the times.
Today the renowned restaurants have well-structured sites, profiles on all the social
networks constantly updated and in this way the customer chooses in which place to book
his meal, more and more often, based on the first impression he gets by peeking at some
pictures and review on the internet and between a well-reviewed and well-photographed
venue and one with everything, choose the first one.
But what happens to those small realities that, not keeping up with all this, find themselves
living only with those who already know them or by word of mouth?
And that’s how I decided, with a simple gesture, a photo and a review, to let the internet
people discover those who have a lot to offer, but don’t know how to make it known. We
Local Guide costs only a few minutes of our time but for these deserving people, it can
make the difference between a shutter to close forever or not.