This is how I evaluate restaurants on Yelp. I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews. If they are things like the weather was bad, the prices are too high or the waiter was rude to me, I assume the place is pretty good. People without much taste love places with cheap food and extremely polite and fast service. I like good food.
Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.
Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful.
And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.
Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.