Our Method
We organize by mood first — rooftop, speakeasy, cocktail bar, nightclub — because that's closer to how people actually decide where to go. Nobody thinks "I want Category: Lounge tonight," they think "I want somewhere quiet and dark" or "I want to be able to dance." Category still matters underneath as metadata; it's just not the front door.
How venues get added
Every listing starts from public business records — the kind of information anyone can look up for a real business: name, area, category, rating and review count. We don't cold-call venues or pay for placement, and no venue pays us to rank higher or appear more often.
The vault-first rule
Every venue write-up on this site is built from real scraped fields only. We never invent opening hours, atmosphere details, menu items or reviews for a real named business. When a venue has enough of a public footprint — its own website, a social bio — that we can responsibly add a detail or two, we do, but only if it's sourced from something we can point to. If a field can't be honestly filled, we leave it blank instead of guessing.
What the mood chips actually mean today
Some of the homepage's quick filters — like "Rooftop" and "Speakeasy" — map to a real category field we've verified for every venue, so those filters are exact. Others, like "Open past 2am" or "Live music," don't have scraped hours or tag data behind them yet, so for now those chips route to the full directory instead of pretending to filter on something we can't back up. We'd rather tell you that upfront than fake a filter.
Verification
Farah runs the "is this still open" checks — venues close, rebrand or move, and a directory that doesn't catch that stops being useful fast. Listings get revisited periodically rather than written once and left alone.