Quick answer: Traveling like a local means trading the top-10 list for the shorter, better one – eating where the neighborhood actually eats, shopping where it actually shops, and asking someone who lives there instead of trusting whoever paid for the placement. It is slower and less Instagrammable on paper, and it is the only method that has ever actually worked for us.
This is the thinking behind Like A Local Guide, written by the team that runs Like A Local Tours. We started in 2014 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a woman-founded company built on one simple habit: showing friends where to actually go. Our guides are working actors and lifelong New Yorkers, not scripted narrators, and that same habit – ask someone who lives there – is what built this guide, city by city.
What does "travel like a local" actually mean?
It means every recommendation has to survive one test: would we send a friend there? Not "is it famous," not "does it rank on page one," not "did they buy the placement" – would we personally tell someone we love to go. That single filter quietly disqualifies most "best of" lists, because most of what ranks well online got there through marketing budget, not merit.
Why skip the top-10 list?
Because the top-10 list is usually the same list everywhere – a scraped, reshuffled version of what every other site already published, written for search engines rather than for your actual three days in the city. It sends everyone to the same three restaurants, the same photo spot, the same souvenir shop. Real neighborhoods have more range than that, and most of it sits one or two blocks off the route the tour buses take.
How do you actually find where locals go?
Mostly by asking, and by spending enough time somewhere that the asking is worth something. Our guides walk the same six blocks of a neighborhood for years – they know which bakery changed hands and got worse, which market stall is worth the line, and which "hidden gem" got written up and is not hidden anymore. That kind of judgment is not something you can fully outsource to an algorithm, though it is exactly what a good guide – human or written – should be doing the outsourcing for you.
Does "like a local" just mean avoiding tourists?
No, and treating it that way misses the point. Some of the best food in a city is at the famous place, and some neighborhoods are worth seeing precisely because they earned the crowds. The goal is not avoiding people on principle; it is making sure a recommendation is there because it is good, not because it paid to be. Sometimes that is a hole-in-the-wall nobody photographs. Sometimes it is the market hall everyone already visits, filtered down to the two stalls actually worth the line.
How does Like A Local Guide actually decide what to recommend?
Editorially, not commercially. Nobody pays to appear in the guide – a place earns a spot because someone on our team would send a friend there, the same standard the tours have used since 2014. Where we do link out to a hotel search, an eSIM, or travel insurance, we say so plainly, and that never decides what gets recommended in the guide itself.
Put the method to work
The clearest way to see how this plays out is to look at what it produces. Our NYC markets guide exists partly because two of our own tours start at Essex Market; our Milan food guide and Barcelona neighborhood guide follow the same rule, city to city. Start with the full list of cities we cover, or browse every local guide we have published. And if you want the in-person version of this same standard, Like A Local Tours runs public food tours and private tours across New York City.