Editorial
The question of how to discover new bars divides into two distinct problems: finding great bars in cities you live in (discovery over time) and finding great bars in cities you are visiting for 48 hours (research under pressure). The methods differ significantly, but the underlying principles are the same across both.
The fastest way to find a great bar in an unfamiliar city is to find an editorial guide that cares about the same things you do. The best editorial bar guides organise recommendations by occasion and neighbourhood rather than by overall rating, which makes them immediately more useful than review aggregators. A guide that tells you the 8 best cocktail bars in Berlin before 9pm on a Wednesday is more useful than a list of the city's top 50 bars sorted by star count. The difference is editorial judgment versus algorithmic averaging. When we built barsforkings.com, the decision to organise by occasion was deliberate: browse cocktail bars, hidden gem bars, or bars by city to see how that structure changes what you find.
Most people use Google Maps. That is a reasonable default and consistently produces mediocre results. The map algorithm rewards SEO-optimised venues, tourist-facing businesses, and places that actively manage their review presence. It does not reward the bars that the local bar industry actually drinks at. For genuine discovery, the tools that work are: Foursquare (used by locals, underrated by everyone else), Untappd for craft beer (real-time check-ins show exactly where people are drinking right now), The Infatuation (editorial-first, expanding beyond New York), and barsforkings.com for occasion-based discovery across 72 cities. Instagram location tags work in cities with strong visual bar culture — search the location tag for a neighbourhood, not a bar name.
The best bar recommendations from locals follow a consistent pattern. Ask a hotel concierge at a boutique hotel, not a chain: boutique hotel concierges use the bars they recommend. Ask the bartender where they drink on their nights off: the bar where industry people decompress after service is almost always excellent. Walk a neighbourhood at 6pm on a weekday and watch which doors have a steady stream of regulars arriving — those bars are not optimising for tourist visibility, which means they are optimising for something better. The New York hidden gems category is a good example of bars that have survived for years on local loyalty rather than online discovery.
Bar industry newsletters know about openings 4 to 6 weeks before they appear on Eater or Time Out. The best newsletters are written by people who are in bars several nights a week and whose recommendations reflect genuine opinion rather than press release relationships. Reddit local subreddits (r/AskNYC, r/london) surface recommendations that are specific, recent, and unsponsored — the downside is quality variance, but the signal-to-noise ratio improves significantly when you filter for highly upvoted responses to specific questions. For discovering hidden gem bars specifically, community methods outperform editorial guides because the editorial filter takes time to catch what the community sees in real time.
The most reliable physical discovery method is walking a bar-dense neighbourhood at 8pm and reading the rooms through the windows. A bar with staff talking to each other has good culture. A bar with a handwritten specials board cares about what is on it. A bar with a clean, organised back bar is managed by someone who thinks about presentation. Contrast this with the tourist trap identifiers: large printed menus displayed outside, photographs of cocktails, no one at the bar who looks like a regular. The guide to avoiding tourist trap bars covers these signals in detail.
The highest-leverage discovery happens before you arrive. Three to four weeks before travel, post a specific question to the relevant Reddit city subreddit (not "what are the best bars" but "best cocktail bar in Kreuzberg for someone who loves bitter, spirit-forward drinks on a Thursday"). Check the World's 50 Best Bars list for your destination city — if it appears, the programme worth visiting is listed. Read the most recent "best new bar" coverage in local press. And use the barsforkings city directory to identify which category pages exist for your destination, which gives you a structured starting point for category-level research.
Bar discovery is a layered process. Use editorial for the framework, locals for the hidden pieces, apps for real-time validation, and your own observation for the rest. The bars that reward this approach tend to be the best ones in any city.
One email every week. The bars our editors are recommending right now, across 72 cities worldwide.
Senior Editor for European and Asian content at barsforkings.com. She has bar-hopped across 34 cities on 4 continents and has an opinion about every one of them.