About Brooklyn Of.
One search habit, taken much too far.
Why Brooklyn
Don't take the name too literally. Nobody goes to a city looking for Brooklyn, and neither do we. It's just a metaphor for the coolest neighborhood in a city: the one with good coffee in the morning, dinner at a place that opened last month, a cocktail bar hidden behind a mirror in a pub, and somewhere to stay that isn't a chain. It's never the part the guidebook leads with. This is a travel site for the travelers who look for that part first.
We use the word because lots of people already do. "The Brooklyn of x" is often what gets typed into a search bar when someone is deciding which part of town to book the Airbnb or the hotel in. That's what we used to do before we built this website. The phrase has been travel shorthand for twenty years, about everywhere from Stockholm to Oakland. We didn't invent it. We committed to answers.
The name is also chosen on purpose, and yes, it's a little provocative. Some locals are annoyed to see their neighborhood measured against a borough of New York at all. Fair enough, and part of the fun. Others are annoyed for the opposite reason: we picked the wrong neighborhood, and theirs is the real one. If a verdict makes someone fight for their own corner of town, the page is working, and the runners-up sit on every city page for exactly that reason.
Being a little provocative also gets the word out. We won't pretend otherwise. But don't take any of it too seriously. This is a travel site about one kind of neighborhood, and one small idea taken a little too far.
How this gets made
The list was supposed to be short. It got out of hand, in the way good projects do, and the atlas now covers over 150 cities. It stops where cities do: a place needs a certain size before this kind of neighborhood appears, and some big cities still don't have one. The method is personal experience where we have it, far too much research where we don't, and in most cities a sense-check with local tastemakers. Meaning friends of friends who live there and have opinions.
What makes the list
No big chains, nothing sponsored, and quality beats quantity: three great bars make a better list than five with filler. The full rulebook - what counts as local, why a soft-brand hotel can sneak in while a regular Marriott never will - lives on the how we pick page.
Reach us
We list over 3,000 venues across over 150 cities, so statistically a few entries are wrong right now: a photo of the wrong venue, a bar that quietly moved, a fact that makes no sense. Spot one? Write to takedown [at] brooklynof.com and we'll look into it. You're also welcome to disagree with the picks. Plenty of people will. Just don't pitch your own venue: placements aren't for sale, and this guide is independent and staying that way. Everything else: hello [at] brooklynof.com.
/ Per - Creator of Brooklyn Of