Here is one of the most reliable travel tips we have. The first bar you visit on any night out is almost never the best bar of the night. It is usually the one closest to your hotel, or the one with the best Google reviews, or the one your hotel concierge recommended — meaning it is optimized for tourists. The bar that ends up being the best of the night is almost always the second one. We call this the Second Bar Rule.
How it works: have one drink at the first bar. Pay attention to which other customers look like locals. Strike up a conversation. Ask them where they would go for the second drink. Then go there.
The Second Bar will, with surprising reliability, be (a) cheaper, (b) less polished, (c) much more atmospheric, and (d) full of people who know each other. It will rarely have a Google rating because most of its customers don’t bother to write reviews.
Variations on the rule: the Second Restaurant Rule (ask your dinner waiter where they would eat tomorrow night). The Second Café Rule (ask your barista which other café they go to on their day off). The Second Shop Rule (ask the shopkeeper at the first vintage store which other vintage store you should visit).
All of these work because they bypass the algorithmic selection bias of the modern web. The first place is where the algorithm sends you. The second place is where humans send you. They are almost never the same.
