Index of local food blogs for a city?

Occasionally I run across blogs or websites that have excellent reviews of city food of all stripes, from fancy places to street carts. The theme is "find the best food, wherever it is," across most cuisines and the updates usually have lists or photos of the best dishes at each restaurant and a recommendation about whether you should eat there.

Examples:

Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide in Washington, DC and surrounding area: http://www.tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/
Hungry in Taipei: http://hungryintaipei.blogspot.tw/
Jonathan Gold's 101 LA Restaurants: http://ballots.latimes.com/lists/101-best-restaurants-jonathan-gold-2013/

I was curious if anyone has compiled a list of these for cities where they exist, ex. I'm going to Chennai, how can I find out what's best?

Best Answer

I don't think you're going to find a complete online list of food blogs that does what you want. The reason for this is that compiling and maintaining such a list would be a very time consuming task. Even if it was based on self-submission it runs the risk of having out-of-date blogs listed or being spammed or gamed by 'for-pay' food blogs. And it's still never going to be close to complete.

You probably could build something that generated lists of local food blogs by doing a Google search in the background, but I doubt anyone has because people can just Google for themselves. To add value it would have to be a curated list of blogs, regularly checked to add new entries, remove out of date ones and aim for some base level of quality. It's too much work for too little reward, in my opinion. Add to this that not all food blogs are location based, and there are many blogs that cover both food and other stuff and it becomes difficult to know what to include and what not to.

I did find one site that seems to attempt to do it with this Food Blog Map. However it lists none of the sites you mention, nor does it list the majority of the food blogs I read for various places. I'm not sure how up-to-date it is.

I'd be very happy to be proved wrong and find out that there is a site out there, but I doubt it. I was wondering if it's the sort of thing that a wiki site (like Wikivoyage) could incorporate -- but again it may just be too much work to police.

So, what can you do? As DaveP says in the comments, your best bet is to search online for 'food blog area' and go through the results. I had thought you would might be able to do a search for area and 'food' on one of the big analytics sites (like Alexa) but I can't find a way to do it.

What I would do is find a site you like for an area and then go look for their 'links' section (and they will almost certainly have one) and look at other sites they recommend.

As I mention above, there is a growing trend for food blogs to be basically adverts where some or all of the entries are positive because they're paid for (either with actual cash, or just free food). This is why following links from sites you trust is often a better strategy than a straight search. Look for sites that offer clear statements about their policy for paid entries and make it clear when the food has been given for free. Also look for sites that are not afraid to be negative about places.

Asking a specific question about food blogs for a given place here might stray too far into opinion based to be on topic, but I'd think you'll get decent answers in chat.