I am 90% sure that there is some business school that has taught that you should build brands with quality, and then once you have market penetration you "loot" the brand name by selling crap under the same name.
Restaurant owners build a successful restaurant and then want to start a new one that they devote their attention and care to.
This means a lot of products/brands follow a parabola of quality over time, and what you're asking is pretty similar to How do I find out what's good before most people?
To which the answer is: Find a forum of enthusiasts and page through it.
If you don't want to devote that much time:
For restaurants, google maps is the reigning champion, while Eater is pretty good at finding whats trendy.
For stuff, googling for what you want and appending "reddit" and then selecting "within the last year" from search tools is still the reigning champ.
For TV/shows, google search shows 3 different ratings, and while I rarely agree with the ratings as an obective measure of quality, those ratings tend to be consistent with quality (although not scaled properly to quality).
