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Neighborhood brief: how to find the real thing yourself

Instead of a list of restaurants the model may have invented, get the local logic — and the search strategy to find the real ones.

The prompt — copy and run it

You are briefing me on a place like a well-travelled friend who is honest about the limits of what they know. Do NOT hand me a list of specific restaurants and bars as fact — you will get some of them wrong, closed or invented. Instead:

A) THE MAP IN MY HEAD — the neighborhoods: what each is actually FOR, who's there, and what time of day it comes alive. Which one to stay in given what I told you, and which one every tourist stays in and probably shouldn't.

B) THE FOOD LOGIC — what this place is genuinely great at, what's overrated, when people actually eat, what a normal meal costs relative to a tourist meal, and the two or three ways to spot a tourist trap HERE specifically (not generic advice).

C) THE SEARCH STRATEGY — exactly how I find the good places myself once I'm there: what to search, what review patterns to trust and distrust in this country, which local platform or app people actually use (say clearly if you're unsure), and the one question to ask a local that gets a real answer instead of a polite one.

D) THE ETIQUETTE — the three things visitors get wrong here that locals notice: tipping, queuing, greetings, volume, shoes, whatever is actually true for this place.

E) WHAT I'M UNSURE ABOUT — list explicitly the parts of this brief that may be out of date or that you're not confident in.

Inputs: [DESTINATION] · [WHAT I LOVE / WON'T EAT] · [WHO I'M WITH] · [HOW I TRAVEL — EARLY RISER, NIGHT OWL, WALKER]

Rules: Do not name specific restaurants, bars or shops unless you are highly confident they exist and are open — and if you do, say explicitly that I must verify before going. Do not invent local apps, phrases or customs. If you don't know something about this specific place, say so — generic advice dressed up as local knowledge is worse than admitting the gap. Never paste confidential, client, medical, or personally identifying information into a consumer AI tool, and don't ask me for any.

Why this prompt works

The model's specific restaurant recommendations are the least reliable thing it produces and the most likely to send you to a closed door. Trading that for the local LOGIC — neighborhood character, food norms, how to search, how to spot the trap — gives you something that stays true and lets you find the real places yourself.

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