For a lot of businesses, typically the kind that most people don’t generally review, a good rating doesn’t really mean anything, a bad rating might if there’s a few of them.

For restaurants, cafes and bars it depends where you are. Every area will have one or two sites/apps where most people typically review these kinds of business. So in some areas Google reviews are a pretty good gauge of things, in others they’re basically useless.

The other thing to figure out is what “good” actually is for a given area, because a 4.7 in some areas could mean one of the best meals you ever have, and in others it could just be an average rating.

Whenever I’m traveling to a new area and looking for that kind of thing, I can usually find people talking about the above for a given area either on travel forums (or places like Reddit) or by watching a few travel vlogs focused on food options, where it often comes up as a topic.

Edit: clarity, don’t just use “place” to mean all three of area, business and website in every instance, kids!