You've narrowed it to two. Both are 4.5. Both are close enough. At this point the rating has done all the work it can do, and staring at it longer won't help.
Here's what actually separates them, roughly in order of how much it predicts your experience.
Same rating, different volume, take the bigger number. A 4.5 across 2,000 reviews is a much safer bet than a 4.5 across 90, because it's been tested far more thoroughly. This is the single most reliable tiebreaker and it takes two seconds.
Sort both by newest and read three from each. You're looking for a place that's currently good, not one that was good in 2022.
If one has enthusiastic reviews from last month and the other's recent ones are lukewarm while its older ones glow, you've found your answer. Declines show up in recent reviews long before they show up in the average.
More reviews, and better recent ones. Those two checks resolve most ties in under a minute.
Read the 2- and 3-star reviews for each. Not to count them — to see what they're about.
One place gets criticized for being loud and slow. The other gets criticized for small portions and expensive drinks. Neither is objectively worse. But if you're going with a group to talk, the loud one is wrong for you, and if you're hungry, the small-portion one is. Match the flaw to your situation.
Overall rating averages everything a place does. You only care about part of it.
Search within the reviews for the dish or service you're actually after. Most listings let you search review text. A restaurant with a mediocre overall rating can have a legendary version of the one thing you want, and a great overall rating can hide the fact that everyone praises the pasta and nobody mentions the fish.
If the occasion matters at all — a date, a group, anything where the setting is part of it — thirty seconds in the customer photos will separate two identically-rated places immediately. Ratings don't capture whether a place feels right for what you're doing.
The live "popular times" data is real behavioral evidence, not opinion. If one place is packed at 7pm on a Thursday and the other is empty, local people have already voted with something more meaningful than a star rating.
Use this one carefully in reverse, though — busy also means waiting. If you're short on time, the quieter one may be the better call despite being the lesser restaurant.
The Recommended sort on MyTopRate does tiebreaker #1 automatically — when two places share a rating, the one with more reviews behind it ranks higher. The rest still needs your eyes, but that's the one that matters most.
Sometimes both options really are equivalent, and the honest answer is that you've hit diminishing returns. Pick the closer one and go. Ten more minutes of research to choose between two good restaurants is ten minutes you could have spent eating at one of them.