You didn't specify, but I'm going to assume that you're talking about going to the Yelp.com Web site and doing your searches there. Yelp also has a very slick iPhone application and other ways you can access their data from mobile devices.

You're right, though, that they have some sort of inexplicable strategy for figuring out what restaurants are good matches for a search by area, and it's often restaurants far from where you are looking.

I recently ran into this same problem looking for a restaurant in Westminster, Colorado (just outside of Denver). Yelp was recommending restaurants in downtown, but the whole point of looking in Westminster was to avoid the hassles and parking challenges of downtown venues. Jeez!

Here's how I finally figured things out...

First off, I went to the site and entered "restaurant" as the "what" and "Westminster, CO" as the "where". The results were all over the place, as you can see in this little thumbnail map that it displayed:

Most of those restaurants were actually in Broomfield, and the listing itself included a bunch in downtown Denver. What's the point of that, Yelp?

I looked at the search criteria a bit more closely and realized that it was expanding the search to give me more options. Without me specifying that's what I wanted to do:

To narrow things down, I clicked on the checkbox adjacent to the exact city of my search, and also clicked on "Highest Rated" as a search criterion and additionally clicked on the "Biking" radius so it'd give me matches within two miles of the Westminster city center:

The results were exactly what I sought, and really, I think they should be the default results:

Nicely clustered in the city I'm interested in, and with some restaurants that have impressively high ratings here on Yelp. Good data, and plenty sufficient for me to read through the reviews and pick on as the venue for an upcoming lunch meeting.

Now you know how to do this too. Good luck!