Yelp.com : A tutorial on how to find quality local businesses

Let's start of 2011 with a way to find and do business with excellent local small businesses. One tool I use, especially for restaurants, is Yelp.com.

I'll present a step by step way of locating the best of class local businesses within their category and geography. For this example, I'll locate Mexican restaurants within Orange County, California. We'll also do a search by city using Anaheim, Calfornia, but I will show how that is more of a limited search and does not provide the best results as some of the better restaurants are outside the city.

Ok here it goes:
1) Go to Yelp.com (in another browser session of course).
2) At the top, in the Near (Address, Neighborhood, City, State or Zip) text box, type in Orange County, CA and press enter.
3) Near the top, under Browsing Orange County Businesses, click Restaurants (if you can't find out, hit control+f, type in the word restaurants to locate it on the webpage).
4) Once again, near the top, under Restaurants Orange County, click Mexican (control+f to search for it if necessary).
5) Ok now we need to sort all the Mexican restaurants in Orange County, CA so that the best ones appear on top of the list. Near the top, under Mexican Orange County click Highest Rated and the restaurant El Toro Bravo will appear as the first one. It gets 4.5 stars out of 5 stars (located to the right of the restaurant name) which is pretty good! It's located in Costa Mesa which is a bit far from me, but if I was in the area and I was hungry for Mexican (of course the family would have to approve Mexican), I would go there as my first choice for Mexican. Note that there's an INTERACTIVE map (you can move the map and also zoom in/out) that shows all the restaurants on that page. It's helpful when locating businesses close to you.
6) Let's click on El Toro Bravo and we will sort by date since the latest reviews are most accurate. Maybe the owners changed or there was a change to the food for the better or worse. Scroll down 1 screen down to the Sort By section. It's kind of hidden. It starts right above the first review. Do a control+f and look for Sort By if you cannot find it. Once found, on the same line, click on Date. Now it shows the newest reviews first. If you want to see the oldest reviews first, click on Date again.


As an additional demonstration, let's search in the City of Anaheim, CA. You will notice that the best restaurants do not come up because we limited ourselves just to the city and not the county. I prefer to search by County. Sometimes the County is too big, like Los Angeles County. Then, I would have to type in the city and also try the surrounding cities. Perhaps, I would also use the zipcode.

1) At the top, in the Near (Address, Neighborhood, City, State or Zip) text box, type in Anaheim, CA and press enter.
2) Near the top, under Browsing Anaheim Businesses, click Restaurants
3) Near the top, under Restaurants Anaheim, click Mexican
4) Let's sort the Mexican restaurants in Anaheim, CA so that the best ones appear on top of the list. Near the top, under Mexican Anaheim click Highest Rated and the restaurant Anepalco's Cafe will appear as the first one. Once again, note that there's an INTERACTIVE map that shows all the restaurants on that page.
5) Lastly, sort by date. Follow step 6 from above.


Ummm... I like to do Highest Rated rather than Most Reviewed. I find it more accurate. Accuracy is the name of the game. The most frequented restaurants are not necessarily the best ones. A lot of times, they're the cheapest ones that the masss go to. A lot of chains will score high under Most Reviewed. Face it, most of the time, most people are not looking for better food, oonly the cheapest.

If you want to see the reviews on a particular restaurant/business, on the Yelp.com page, just type in the name of the restaurant/business and city or zipcode at the top.

I hope this has been helpful. I know I didn't do screenshots (too lazy). Maybe some of you use Yelp.com to locate businesss in other categories such as flowers, car wash, etc. I'd be interested what other categories are popular on Yelp.com.

Best Mexican Food in Orange County - El Taco Sabroso Grill

BEST MEXICAN RESTAURANT IN ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA



Dateline: El Taco Sabroso Grill for Mexican Food the night of 10-24-2010

I usually don't go out of my way to post about restaurants unless they're really, really special. I went to one last night that had really good food (for the price). Ok, it didn't have a super fancy decor. Heck, there was nothing fancy about it. There was just good food made with a lot of attention and elbow grease. The service was very attentive too.

Another negative. It's located in between more traveled streets and harder to get to. The area has a industrial feel to it. Yes, it's downtown Placentia but it's a ghost town at night!

It's the best Mexican food in Placentia and surrounding cities like Fullerton or Yorba Linda. It's a stone's throw from the Cal State Fullerton university. Ok, maybe it's not the best. I'm sure the fancy fusion places that charge $50 for a fancy square plate can beat this, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about $10 combo plates with A LOT of food. Ok, it's not the healthiest or the best ingredients (say organic or local) out there, but I didn't notice any filler ingredients. No fake stuff! Frankly, I don't understand how they stay in business with such low prices. Where's their profit?

I had the chili relleno combination plate with 2 sides: chicken enchilada with green sauce and a hard beef taco. The chicken meat was boiled instead of fried. I liked the chicken enchillada and beef taco more than the chili relleno, even though the chili relleno is much more sophisticated to make. So much for the unsophisticated palate! The chili relleno was still one of the best I had and had what seemed like 1/4 of a cheese block inside! That's a lot of cheese!

It's good to support mom and pops / family run. I sure got a lot more value visiting this place than say a chain like Acapulco or El Torito Grill where they have the decor but not so fresh, fake food.

Well I guess that's it for now... Oh I'll show you guys how to use Yelp.com to find good restaurants (mom and pops and family run ones) in your local area in the next blog entry. I also use Yelp.com to find restaurants when I'm out of town. It's the "keep them honest" tool for locating good food and avoiding the bad.

Here's El Taco Sabroso Grill on Yelp.com