I get to Anaheim from Silicon Valley every January for an annual trade show, and I have found plenty of great restaurants in the county, including the best Thai restaurant I’ve ever visited. The trick for convention folks is to have a car or get a ride so you can get a few miles away from the ultra-tourist culinary desert near Disneyland and the Convention Center. Orange County is still the suburbs, so you’re unlikely to match the best of New York or New Orleans for European-influenced food. But I doubt even New York can match Orange County for a lot of Asian cuisines, including Thai and Vietnamese.

Chowhound has some fantastic posts on Orange County that have been a huge help on my annual trips. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten in Irvine, but there are plenty of great places in Stanton, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Westminster, Orange, and even pricier areas like Laguna Beach. But the best places are not always obvious, and you usually can’t check them out as a pedestrian like you can in New York, so more advance research is sometimes required. Good luck!

The same thing happens, of course, on the internet: communities are only as good as their members. However, maybe because using the internet, and even more *writing* on it, is still a slightly elitist activity, but rather because we select, consciously or not, our sources to match our tastes, we are kind of used to find advice we like. I find Yelp quite good for me. Possibly also, the internet (especially sites with user participation) has some complex ability to select, filter, match, information to people who need it. You could call that an “invisible hand” ability at selecting quality. I wouldn’t believe much in that, but what is clear is that we are now used to rich, variate, information, which a book can’t provide. Zagat is also disappointing to us, because it’s a much more “rigid”, “unidimentional” media than the internet.