I’m a huge foodie and love trying local and international cuisine whenever I travel. As a British expat in Spain for the first time in 2013, I ended up in many tourist trap restaurants trying what I thought was the best local food on offer. This was before I used Google maps or any other online reviews, I just went to the places that were the ‘loudest’ and caught my attention.
Fast-forward to 2019 and I have become someone Spanish friends come to when they want advice on where to eat. This is largely due to the fact that I started doing more research by reading blogs, Google maps reviews, following foodie influencers, but also because I decided to take a chance on small and traditional restaurants that the average tourist wouldn’t even look twice at because they are not pretty and don’t have the best location or décor. These are restaurants that aren’t ‘loud’ on or offline because they’re either not clued up on how to be or because they do well enough as it is in their neighbourhood with all their local regulars who know them as the best place for a pincho de tortilla.
So, one day while I enjoyed the best tortilla I’ve ever had in my life at a small shabby restaurant that only the locals frequented, it dawned on me that there are so many tourists in the same situation as I was in not long ago, looking to try the best paella or best tortilla and ending up eating very average food at a ridiculous price because the restaurant is pretty or because it invests a lot in online marketing.
I realised that there are so many amazing restaurants making unbelievably good food that go unnoticed and decided that I had to do something to connect them with all those people who were dying to try the very food these restaurants were serving but were getting lost in the sea of restaurants that did a much better job getting noticed and didn’t necessarily have the best food.
This is why I love sharing on Google maps, because I want to put amazing restaurateurs on the map, the ones who have no idea about social media or online marketing or are just not interested in that because all they care about is making the best food and making their customers happy.
