About the magazine

City Guide Europe started as a shared notebook. A handful of us kept passing the same scrappy document back and forth before trips, adding the bakery that was actually worth the queue, crossing out the restaurant that had quietly gone downhill, scribbling the name of the neighbourhood where we had finally slept well. After a few years the notebook was better than most of the guidebooks we had paid for, and we decided to make it public.

How we write

Every guide here is built on the same simple idea: we would rather you do three things properly than thirty things in a hurry. So we tell you one neighbourhood to base yourself in, the handful of meals worth planning your day around, and the single sight you would regret skipping. That is it. No fifty-stop checklists, no breathless superlatives, no places we have not actually been.

We travel by train wherever we can, we walk far more than we ride, and we eat where the menu is short and the room is full of locals. When something changes, a bouchon closes, a viewpoint gets fenced off, we update the guide and say so. These are living documents, not glossy snapshots.

A note on the photos

The images you see across the site right now are placeholders, served from a free image service while the magazine is in its early days. Before we send any guide out into the world properly, they will be replaced with licensed or original photography of the real streets, plates and skylines we describe. We mention this because we would rather be honest about a work in progress than pretend otherwise.

Get in touch

We read everything. If you have walked one of these cities and found a table we should know about, a viewpoint we missed, or a place that no longer deserves its spot, tell us. The notebook only got good because people kept adding to it.

Write to us at [email protected]. Safe travels, and take the long way round.