Look, this isn't some moral stand against indiscriminately deep-frying vegetables and other foodstuffs. Rather, it's just an inclination I have that when I'm in a new place, I want to discover new things--things that aren't normally available to me during my humdrum, nine-to-five existence in my hometown zip code. And that includes eating at places you won't find on every other major thoroughfare across this land of ours.

There is a downside to my "Only Local Eateries Need Apply" stance to eating on the road: It is awfully difficult to know where to find good local eateries when you are not yourself a local. When I get off in a plane in a strange town, I don't even know if my checked luggage arrived with me--I certainly can't be expected to rattle off a list of all the decent barbecue joints within a five-mile radius of my hotel.

But LocalEats can be expected to do precisely that. The iPhone app gathers up dining information from the to offer a handy guide to the top 100 restaurants in 50 major U.S. cities.

Before you download LocalEats, it's important to understand what the application does not do. This is not a social networking application where you can post your reviews and ratings of local eateries and read the opinions of other users (though there is a comment feature for each restaurant listing within LocalEats). For something like that, you'd be better off turning to a customer-review-focused app like . And while LocalEats does allow for some location-based searches, it's not really a restaurant finder in the vein of , , or any other location-aware finder apps. LocalEats provides you with very specific reviews of very specific restaurants in very specific cities--and apart from one or two interface quibbles, it performs this task well. It's an ideal choice for travelers who hunger for a solid reference guide to the dining scene in unfamiliar cities.

When you launch LocalEats, you're presented with an alphabetical list of 50 major cities across the U.S. Tap a city name to see a list of the Top 100 restaurants in that town as rated by Where the Locals Eat. (Some larger metropolitan areas--New York, for example-- feature more than the advertised 100 listings, the app's developer says.)