Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful.

And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.