Travel: eat well somewhere you do not know

Everybody eats badly on the first night somewhere new. You arrive late, you are tired, and you go to whatever is nearest and lit.

The second night is usually better because you have walked around. Travel is about getting the first night to be the second night.

Hubs for places

Every city and town has a page: what is good there, what people have actually rated, and which dishes are worth going for.

Small towns matter most here. There is a great deal written about eating in the big cities and almost nothing about anywhere with a population under ten thousand, which is precisely where you are most likely to be stuck.

The photographs do the work

When you have never been somewhere, descriptions are close to useless. Everywhere is "cosy", everywhere does "modern Irish with a twist".

A dozen photographs of a dozen plates, taken by people who ate them, tells you what the kitchen is like in about four seconds. That is why the pages are built around pictures of food rather than around copy.

Why a town page beats a search

Searching works when you can name the thing you want. Arriving somewhere new, you cannot — the useful question is "what is this place good at", and no search box answers it.

A town page does. It shows what is actually rated there, what people photographed, and which dishes come up repeatedly. Sometimes the answer is a surprise: a town with one famous spot and four better ones nobody writes about is an extremely common shape.

Food-led breaks

Some trips are organised around eating, and there is a section for that: places to stay chosen for the food rather than the room — somewhere with a kitchen worth travelling for, or somewhere near one.

You do not book through Mosey. It shows you what is on offer and links you to the place's own site. Nothing is booked or paid for here, and that is deliberate rather than a gap: a hotel is better at selling its own rooms than a food app is.

Leaderboards, and what they are for

Places in an area are ranked by what people actually rated, not by who paid.

That is useful in a town you do not know for one narrow reason: it gives you a starting point that is not an advertisement. It is not a definitive ordering of quality and it is not trying to be — a place that opened last month with four ratings is not worse than one with four hundred, it is just newer.

Treat it the way you would treat a local telling you three names. A starting point, not an instruction.

Before you go, not when you arrive

The single most useful habit is looking the night before rather than on the street.

Deciding where to eat while standing on a pavement in the rain with a dying phone is how everybody ends up somewhere ordinary. Ten minutes on a train, with a list to save into, changes the entire trip.

Keep what you find

Save places to a list before you go.

Ahead of a trip it is somewhere to put everything you have been told about — the thing a colleague mentioned, the bakery from a video, the place your sister went. While you are there it is a map. Afterwards it is the only decent record of what you ate, which otherwise vanishes about a fortnight after you get home.

It is also the single most useful thing to hand to somebody going to the same place next month.

What else to look at

• Food trails — several places in one afternoon
• Lists — keeping the places for a trip
• Dishes — what to order when you get there
• Food guides — where to eat, written up properly