I found this to be the opposite in Barcelona. I had a discussion with people who live there who said that since the majority of restaurant customers are tourists (a lot of whom travel on a budget, i.e. young backpackers) and will never come back, most (~70%) restaurants can get away with okay or even substandard food and bad service and still make a profit. So tourism is actually lowering the quality of restaurants. I think because Oslo is so much more expensive than a city like Barcelona, it has a much higher percentage of well-off tourists who are a lot more demanding and have more money to spend, so you end up with more and better restaurants.

That’s what social media sorta solved: bad service will tank a restaurant. Bad food won’t.

I’m thankful that one of my favourite French dishes (aligot), while looking like a pile of whipped vomit, is presented in an entertaining manner.

Interesting... here in a relatively touristy part of Melbourne, anecdotally, it's pretty much those backpackers who are working the tables in half of the trendy restaurants and cafes.

There's definitive trends on making food 'instagrammable', but the overall quality and competition between all the restaurants is undeniably good.

Although now that I think about it, you take somewhere like Lygon street famous for its Italian, and the local advice would be to never eat there if you want good Italian (with maybe one or two notable exceptions).

That's because Australia has incredibly easily accessible tourist working visas. It's what makes it attractive for a broke college kid to bum around in for a few months, in a way that would never happen in Canada, or the United States...

Wages are also far higher than the US or Canada: the legal minimum wage is $19.49/hour, and many industry unions have negotiated higher rates. This means a backpacker can do menial labor and still save meaningful amounts of money to use for travel, even when accounting for the higher cost of living.

I believe in US/Canada if you work in a restaurant Wages are subsidized with tips we don't tip here in Australia so the higher minimum wage probably accounts for that.

In that vein, I'm always optimistic about restaurants in non-touristy places where there's a choice of restaurants (i.e. not just the only one). Those places live and die on local traffic. And people won't go back if it's rubbish.

I live in Amsterdam and I would argue the exact opposite. There are tons of crappy restaurants, bars and night clubs here, primarily in the more touristic places. These places serve shitty food and have shitty service. They get away with it because they do not need repeat customers. There are new tourists that will visit every single day anyway, so why would they bother serving good food and treating their customers well. In my experience less touristy cities in the Netherlands have better food and friendlier service for a lower price.

Maybe "more" but restaurants catering to tourists are not usually "better".

Anecdotally, the Italian food one can find within a mile of the Colosseum is lower quality than what you'd get at any American Olive Garden.

This seems unlikely. I'd believe "One can find Italian food within a mile of the Coliseum of lower quality than..." but that's a different statement than the one you've made here.

Tourists traps aren’t anything new. If anything, social media helps guide people away from them in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Realistically, they both serve Barilla dried pasta.

I know I’m about to get ripped off and have a subpar meal when there’s English on the menus. Flavors are almost always subdued and everything normalizes to some weird not quite local cuisine to appease picky travelers. Then there’s always the one exotic thing on the menu that’s made for show and the instagram photos, but the flavor is bland as can be.

The worst thing about overtourism is it makes travel boring. Everything tries to repackage itself as something accessible for 30-something middle class people who don’t want to go to Disney Land but also don’t want to worry about a stomachache or a weird smell.

I'm curious about where in Oslo you're talking about (I just lived there for 2 years).