How to actually find a good restaurant in Palma

Guidavera's Palma guide starts from the city's Michelin trio. DINS Santi Taura serves a single 11-course tasting menu called Origens, a short walk from the cathedral. Marc Fosh cooks contemporary Mediterranean food inside the Convent de la Missió, a 17th-century former seminary turned boutique hotel. Restaurante Zaranda, run by chef Fernando Pérez Arellano, sits over the remains of an old tannery inside the Es Príncep hotel. All three hold a Michelin star and land in the first five spots on our ranked list of 30 restaurants across Palma, from the old town near Plaça d'Espanya to the Santa Catalina and Portixol waterfront.

That ranking runs on our methodology: we eat at the restaurant first, then weigh Michelin, the Guía Repsol, and other professional recognition above raw diner-review volume, and verify every listing by hand. No restaurant pays for inclusion, a higher rank, or a better tier, and Guidavera doesn't run bookings or take a booking commission. That's what keeps a well-regarded neighbourhood room from getting buried under a tourist-heavy one with mediocre food.

Use it when you're deciding where to eat in Palma and want the evidence cross-checked, not one publication's shortlist or one platform's star average.

TheFork is the booking layer, in Palma the same as anywhere else in Spain. It's been owned by TripAdvisor since 2014. In Spain it trades as El Tenedor, the name it's carried since the company launched in 2007, and it's where a lot of Europe reserves a table online. For diners the draw is the deals: book an off-peak slot and you'll often see 20 to 50 percent off, plus Yums loyalty points on top.

The catch is structural. TheFork makes its money per cover, so the restaurants pushing discounts and paying to be visible are the ones you'll see first. That's genuinely useful for saving money on a Tuesday. It's not a map of where the food is best in Palma. Decide where you want to go first, then check if it's on TheFork to book it.

Google is unbeatable at logistics, especially in a city where the old town's narrow streets don't always match what's on the map. What's open right now, how far it is, the hours, the photos, the phone number, increasingly a Reserve with Google button. For “I'm here, I'm hungry, what's near me,” nothing's faster.

What it can't do is curate. Ratings on Google cluster tightly, so a spot built for tourist turnover near La Seu and a quieter kitchen a few streets over can end up reading almost the same star average, because the algorithm leans on proximity and popularity, not on cooking. Use it to get to the place. Don't use it to pick the place.

TripAdvisor has amassed over a billion reviews across hotels, restaurants, and attractions worldwide, and it covers Palma down to the smallest tapas bar, which is genuinely useful when you're somewhere a guide hasn't reached yet. Its rankings run on what it calls the Popularity Ranking, scored on the quality, quantity, and recency of reviews.

That's also the weakness: it measures popularity, not cooking. A restaurant in a tourist-heavy stretch that's good at collecting reviews can outrank a quieter kitchen doing better food a few blocks away. Treat it as a volume signal, one input among several, which is roughly how a consensus ranking like ours uses it too.

abcMallorca describes itself as the island's leading luxury lifestyle magazine, website, and networking community, published in English, Spanish, and German. Its restaurant section is organised by category (Michelin Star, By the Sea, Romantic, Hidden Gems) and by area, with dedicated Palma write-ups: a guide to the old town, a round-up of the city's best seafood spots, and a list of terraces worth booking.

The strength is genuine local knowledge from writers who live on the island. The catch is that it's one publication's curated shortlists, sorted by mood or occasion, not a ranking cross-checked against outside guides or diner data. There's no published scoring methodology, just editorial picks.

Use it when you want a local writer's take on a specific Palma neighbourhood or occasion, romantic, waterfront, hidden gem, and you're fine picking from a shortlist rather than a ranked list.