Editorial
The best bars for locals are the ones that do not advertise. They have no Instagram presence to speak of, no clever concept, and no queue out the door at 9pm on a Friday. What they have is a clientele who come back because the place feels like theirs — and a level of comfort that no amount of interior design budget can manufacture. We have spent years finding these rooms. Here are the ones that stuck.
European local bar culture is built on repetition — the same seat, the same drink, the same bartender who pours it without being asked. These bars have regulars who have been coming for decades, and the atmosphere they produce is something a tourist bar can never replicate.
These three cities all have a strong drinking culture that tourists often see only the surface of. The bars below are where you will find the city as it actually is — not as it performs for visitors.
American local bar culture is neighbourhood-specific in a way that European bar culture is not. The bars that matter in a city are the ones that anchor their block — the place where everyone from the dentist on the corner to the night-shift nurse from the hospital two streets over comes to decompress. These are those bars.
The quality these bars share is not location or price — it is that they have accumulated enough regular custom to develop a genuine personality. The bartenders know names. The conversations carry across tables. The specials are driven by what someone wants to drink rather than what the distributor is pushing this quarter.
Our advice for finding local bars in any city: walk away from the main tourist street by three or four blocks, look for the bar with a handwritten sign, and order whatever is on draught. The locals found these places because they were good, and they stayed because they kept being good. That is the only quality filter you need.
Sofia has spent fifteen years finding the bars that locals actually use. She contributes to publications in London and Paris and has never paid full price for a wine list she has not read twice.