dalocals

Your answer is the answer I want. Why do you presume it's not valuable to say, "There's a good grocery store over there. I like X brand"?

Maybe I want to know a decent place I can get a cheap hot meal too, but I'm not interested in fancy meals or nice restaurants. I want the workaday egg salad from the tiny deli in New York that costs 4.99 and comes with a pickle. I want the simple pho that's the only thing on the menu. I want the tamales sold from a cooler in the Home Depot parking lot.

I wish there was a better way to signal that's what i want to find than, "Whats a good place to eat?"

I think this author misunderstands the intent of the expression "do what the locals do". It does not mean "do what an arbitrary or random local does" or even "do what the median local does".

It implies seeking the experiences and places that are popular with the locals and not popular with the tourists. It means finding a killer teriyaki or pho place in Seattle and avoiding the space needle, even if an average Seattle resident goes to neither type of place every day.

It means avoiding Times Square and instead wandering the other streets of Manhattan.

The locals do know. Maybe each individual local only visits once a month, but the aggregate knowledge of the locals knows. Great hole in the wall places are known by locals.