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Amsterdam should be up there, it only just skims if off my top 10. Also talking recently to a Madrileno he says the nightlife is now under attack - the govts tired of it all (eg banning street drinking, which was part of everyone's night before), and the economic downturn hasn't helped, closing down thousands of bars . It's still a blast though (go in summer when the bars and clubs convert into myriad outdoor venues), just hemmed increasingly in.
Yep, sun sea surf sex and mooo-zic. If you ever head to that part of the world you just gotta go to Tel Aviv and Beirut, real global party cities, and a whole lot of dancing in you swimwear. Beirut notably is touted as the Middle East's party capital, reprising it's role from before the wars when it was known as the 'Paris of the Middle East' until the 1970s. If ever you go to a Lebanese restaurant you'll notice the loud house music as you settle down to an evening or lunchtime meal - it's not for nothing even in my home city (London) the first 24 hr zone that ever opened up was in the Lebanese district in the 70s.
Agreed that those are two must visit cities when you are in the Middle East. Plus now that Israel no longer stamps passports, it makes it even easier to do both on the same trip.
1. Madrid. OK, NYC has 3000 bars, London 10,000. Madrid has 30,000. .
Where did you get 3,000 bars in NYC from? It's obviously incorrect.
A simple search in the bars/pubs category on yelp for just the 5 boroughs pulls up 15,000 bars, 25,000 in the metro. This doesn't even count all the establishments that can serve liquor. NY State alone has 55,000 liquor licenses issued, the vast majority of which are in NYC.
Regardless, the total number of bars a city has is meaningless to how fun it is...
^actually look again. Yes, that does cover restaurants too (that are listed twice in differing categories). There are over 30,000 restaurants in the city, and many of them have bars (just like any other city).
Shiftgig(?) and random people on answers.com quoting a website that doesn't exist are laughable sources. At least yelp lists the venues. And either way, a bar is a bar whether it's associated with a restaurant or not. Why wouldn't drinking at a bar in restaurant not be considered public drinking?
I can find random numbers on the internet of much lower numbers than you've given for London and Madrid.
"Beer in the evening" claims 4049, listed Pubs Of London website: 1780, people on Quora.com have answered 3,966 and 7000. But I'm a sensible enough individual to not to go quoting them as if they're reliable pieces of information.
And I'd be interested in your source for 30,000 stand alone bars (not associated with food) in Madrid.
Sure you'll only find those listed in Quora or the websites to be counted, but the estimate for pubs and bars stands at about 7,000 for London city proper (but bear in mind 5 million urbanites live contiguously outside the official boundaries, so this is significantly higher if you count the urban city, let alone the metro). And no, this doesn't include restaurants with liquor licenses, or a bar.
The only official stats (unless you wanna go count each one) is from the Institute of Alcohol Studies who in 2014 puts it at 'over 3,000 drinking premises in the West End alone' - just 1 out of 8 entertainment districts, and omitting the thousands of pubs built traditionally on every residential street.
^At the end of the day despite only having the NYC listings at hand, we can from the bare bones of the remaining official sources see just one entertainment district in London has more 'bars, taverns and nightclubs' (not restaurants) than the entire NYC 5 boroughs, and Madrid has a whopping 15x more. Point being both cities have a significantly higher amount and concentration of dedicated venues.
I really don't want to make this another city vs city thread, it would miss the whole point of it. It's just the way it is - and as you mention having more bars isn't a measure of the best place for fun (otherwise Tokyo, with a whopping 166,000 drinking licenses would be number 1 forever, or London of the 1740s with 15,000 taverns and gin palaces would usurp todays'). Neither is the bar the be all and end all - for example NYC has a whopping 35,000 restaurants, I think that's more than anywhere in the West, while Tokyo has the most Michelin stars, versus Paris the highest Michelin stars, and per capita etc etc. Then there's everything else from theatres to food to clubbing to events to just having fun on the beach/ park/ passegiata.
I'll stick to the 15,000 and 25,000 number fine thank you. A bar in a restaurant is still a bar, just as bars in Madrid (tapas bars) and everywhere else often serve as eating establishments.
Yelp is the most comprehensive list for bars in London and NYC I can find, and NYC trounces London and Madrid. But, I understand the data is probably incomplete/inaccurate for all cities, so I'm smart enough not to go spouting off 'facts' from yelp as official. Or even worse, what you're doing, which is pulling random statements from various websites and comparing them against each other without knowing if the data from each source is accurate or consistent with the next.
^likewise then you'd have to count the restaurant bars in the other cities also. And their metros. Fair's fair.
(And let the US Census Bureau know too while you're at it).
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. It's still a blast though (go in summer when the bars and clubs convert into myriad outdoor venues), just hemmed increasingly in.
