Searching for "good restaurants in <city I'm visiting>" is useless. Entire real companies exist to fill the top few slots on that search for any given city. My workaround is, as the article says, to search Reddit instead. Look for the subreddit dedicated to that city, then find their most recent thread on good places to eat - you find much better results.
That said, I strongly suspect this only works because it's not a widely-known strategy. As soon as a critical mass of people start going to reddit instead of google, the same enormous weight of effort people put into SEO will instead go to finding ways to subvert Reddit's authenticity. Sock puppet accounts, astroturfing, generating spammy subreddits, voting rings - there are plenty of strategies, and dedicated experts will have a huge incentive to invent more. Reddit will put up countermeasures, just like Google tries to prevent SEO spam. I don't have any reason to believe Reddit will be more successful in the long term than Google is.
So... enjoy it while it lasts. :)