Where is this chain called Horrors! that you speak of?

I think that at least in the SF Bay Area, that Chowhound is the "most reliable." But you have to get a sense of certain reviewers, and also certain tastes. I tend to use Yelp on a pretty limited basis - a lot of petty and bitter crap, but you can get a general trend.

In my experience, here.

I think that CitySearch is normally pretty reliable. I will then double check with Open Table to confirm a review.

kevineats is epic. are there any other foodbloggers that come close? there was a japanese one with great pics i cant seem to find again. (somewhere in chat logs...) much smaller than kevineats though IIRC.

re yelp, considering people like kevineats have been banned, and restaurants can pay yelp to remove reviews they dont like, not sure it has any credibility left.

Don't forget Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide. Especially for the DC area.

http://www.tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/

Match this against Washingtonian's Cheap Eats edition, and things mentioned favorably in both are worth a try.

Not if it's a BBQ joint

Good point. You really need to find out what food a city excels at and then try and find which restaurants do it best.

I like Menupages in New York. Maybe I identify with the reviewers and have similar expectations.

Chowhound is hit or miss in Montreal, Paris and Rome, not really worth the time. Though there are some knowledgeable contributors, there are also a lot of wannabe foodies who seem to lack experience (and often taste) to make their opinions credible. Ditto Yelp (most recently consulted in Montreal). Tripadvisor might be useful for hotels, but for restaurants, at least in Rome, where I'm living now, it's a joke. We recently went to the restaurant that was briefly rated number 1 in Rome. The waiters couldn't believe their luck, and were excitedly telling everyone who'd listen that they'd just been made number 1 on the site. They were right to be surprised. While the food wasn't bad, it certainly wasn't any better than other neighborhood trattorie, nor was it in a nicer setting or location.

Surprisingly, the restaurant reviews in the New York Times (for restaurants outside of New York) are too often based on hype rather than food. Recent articles about Beirut and Montreal are prime examples. Locals shake their heads and wonder why they chose to review the places they did (and review them well) when there are other more deserving places that offer good food and good atmosphere in such gastronomic cities. There are good food articles in the Times as well, but I now read everything with a proverbial grain of salt.

This isn't practical all the times but...
We usually plan our "bigger" trips 1Q to one year in advance. Having a decent list of dining options is pretty important to us. What we'll do in our extended lead-up time is query a bunch of common websites we use (Flyertalk, Frommers, Chowhound, Yelp, TripAdvisor, whatever travel book we buy, etc.) and come up with a medium sized list. Then we Google the places on the medium list to get additional reviews (eg. from blogs, non-popular/common sites, etc) which in turn, may turn up additional potential places that we'll query further.

Chowhound is usually my starting point. We don't find any one site completely reliable but we usually have the best luck (solid choices) from places that have favourable reviews in multiple sites (this generally weeds out one off bad experiences). Obviously, the problem is that if it's favourably reviewed in a number of popular sites, the place is likely pretty busy. The alternatively is "finding" a somewhat obscure place on a blog supported by other positive reviews.

Reviews we tend NOT to give a lot of credibility to...
- Single post reviewers and/or reviewers that have signed up recently. You don't know if it's the restaurant owner posting a great review of their place or some newb that's just ranting. Ideally, we like to check out other reviews by a poster of a place we've been to so that we can baseline reviews.

- People complaining about stupid things. Sometimes things occur out of a restaurant's control or people have unrealistic expectations. If people explain their experience, we can determine if it was a "one off" or if we can put up with it.

- Old posts/reviews. Restaurants change management, move locations, etc.

- Scoring alone. One person's 5* is another person's 3*. We need to see details in the comments justifying the scoring.

- Local newspaper top 10 lists. Vancouver has the Georgia Straight Golden Plate Awards, Las Vegas has the LVRJ Best of Las Vegas list, Montreal has the Montreal Mirror best of 20xx list, etc, etc. You see McDonalds winning best Fries, Taco Bell best cheap Mexican, etc, etc. Way too many of the masses voting for familiarity versus something that's good.

We find guidebooks hit and miss since most of them have many/multiple contributors. However, we've had pretty crummy dining luck w/ Rick Steves' books which we suspect is due to places recognizing him and going the extra mile just for him for a good review.

Urbanspoon is the most reliable review site for my area. (It took Yelp forever to figure out the local geography, and a lot of folks just didn't want to deal with a site that insisted restaurants that were 30+ miles away were 'neighborhood' eateries.) Just disregard the reviewers who sign up to review or like/dislike exactly one restaurant and never rate anything again.

Chowhound is okay. You might want to set up your computer to filter out the word "sublime"...cuts the verbiage in half...

viamichelin, gault millau, zagat, andyhayler, chowhound, tripadvisor

almost in that order too

im trusting tripadvisor less as i suspect it has a momentum-type effect

Zagat in my experience has been the most accurate and reliable one I've used when traveling around different countries. Viamichelin is also pretty solid.

I'm not interested in what others have to say about a restaurant, rather the only reason I'd end up at a review site is to see what dishes are on offer (that is, failing menupages's food search capability). On chowhound, I can probably get a response to an esoteric food-related question within 24 hours, otherwise I'll just try to type the dish in/look up whatever it is called in its native language (s), and go from there.

i find no value in yelp, chowhound, and trip advisor. they sound like a bunch of kids from peoria.
in the dc area, look at:

http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/
and

http://www.donrockwell.com/

pretty much only ethnic food, but very good food.