One of the things I decided early on about this newsletter is that it would have opinions. Not provocations for their own sake, but actual positions, held genuinely, based on experience.

So: three things I think are overrated, and what I'd suggest instead.

1. Famous wine regions at famous prices

Bordeaux's greatest châteaux produce extraordinary wine. They also produce it at prices that make sense primarily if you're buying wine as an asset class rather than something to drink. The same is broadly true of the Burgundy Grand Crus, certain Napa Cabernets, and a handful of other categories where the price reflects prestige as much as what's in the glass.

What I'd suggest instead: the wine country just outside Valencia. Utiel-Requena, Terres dels Alforins, Castellón. Three regions that produce genuinely excellent wine, receive almost no international attention, and cost a fraction of what you'd pay for comparable quality from a famous appellation. Or the Côtes de Bordeaux, the less glamorous neighbor to the famous Left Bank, where the terroir is similar and the price is honest.

The best value in wine is almost always just outside the appellation everyone has heard of.

2. Eating near the landmark

The restaurant closest to the thing you came to see is, with very few exceptions, the worst restaurant in that neighborhood. This is not a controversial observation but it bears repeating because the temptation is real. You've just walked out of the Colosseum, you're hungry, there are restaurants everywhere.

Don't.

In Rome, Testaccio is fifteen minutes from the tourist circuit and has some of the best traditional Roman cooking in the city, the kind that comes directly from the slaughterhouse workers who were paid in the cuts of meat the nobility didn't want. In Valencia, the neighborhood of Russafa has a food scene that most visitors never find because they stay in the old town. In Bordeaux, the restaurants within two blocks of the Cité du Vin are fine. The restaurants the locals actually use are somewhere else entirely.

The rule I use: walk until the menus stop having photographs, or some guy out front stops trying to drag you inside. That's usually the right neighborhood.

3. The restaurant everyone knows about

A specific example, because specificity is more useful than principle.

Roscioli in Rome is an institution. It has a beautiful meat case, a serious wine cellar, and a reputation that precedes it by about a decade. It is also, in my honest opinion, overrated for everyday dining, in large part because every tourist in Rome knows about it, which is both the cause and the symptom of the problem. The places that deserve the attention it gets are the ones nobody has written a listicle about yet.

That said: Roscioli hosts wine dinners that are genuinely worth attending if the schedule aligns with your visit. Check their website before you go. For everything else, keep walking.

But this isn't really about Roscioli. It's about the broader phenomenon of reputation calcifying into mythology. One of the best meals I had in Rome was at a place I was taken to within days of arriving, chosen by friends of my parents who happened to be visiting and not close to anything. I still think about the duck breast. It would never appear on a best-of list because the people who write best-of lists weren't there.

The alternative to overrated

Here's the thing about all three of these: the better option is almost always nearby, often cheaper, and frequently more interesting. The unknown wine region. The neighborhood fifteen minutes from the Colosseum. The restaurant nobody has written about yet.

The job of a guide, or a newsletter, or a friend who's been somewhere you haven't, is to close that gap. To tell you where the locals actually eat, which wine the sommelier drinks at home, and which piazza the neighborhood gathers in at midnight with drinks from the bar around the corner.

That's what this is for.

What's on your overrated list? Hit reply. I'm genuinely curious whether yours overlaps with mine.

Thirsty Compass is written from personal experience across more than 70 countries, four years living in Rome, and a strong conviction that the best meal is almost never the obvious one.