Trust us on this one.
Hot Tip is a free web app for San Diego. You live somewhere good and still go to the same four places, so tell it what you feel like and it picks one spot near you: open right now, independently owned, never a chain. One place, not a list.
Free, forever. A first name and an email, and no password.
6,479
independent places on the map
66
neighborhoods and towns with a page
0
national chains, now or ever
0
dollars to use it, ever
Counted on from the live Hot Tip map. Listings start from OpenStreetMap and are corrected by hand.
The whole app, on this page
Real San Diego spots, real hours, the same one-answer rule. Pick a mood, pick a part of the county, and see what you get.
tap two things, then this
Your tip lands here.
One place, open right now, independently owned. Never a list.
Your tip for tonight
first time
Nothing open close by. Want to widen it?
Or skip the app and read the map
The things people type into a search box about going out in San Diego, each answered from the listings, with the date.
One place to eat, open right now, picked for you. The question, as a button.
1,794 places with hours on record, checked against the clock in San Diego.
163 places open past 11pm, 99 past midnight, 21 that never close.
6,387 independents by kind and by neighborhood. 248 chain locations left off.
Also: places local sources keep naming and places that have closed, with the source for each.
Not a list. Not a feed. One spot, and a reason to go tonight.
1
Coffee, dinner, drinks, a shop, a haircut. Roughly what you want to spend. How far you'll go. Three taps and you're done.
2
One spot. Open right now, near you, independently owned. Never a ranked list to argue with. Don't like it? Shuffle.
3
Your phone confirms you're there. The stamp lands. At places that have joined, there's something small waiting for you.
6,479 independently owned places, from Oceanside down to Imperial Beach and out to El Cajon, counted on . 66 neighborhoods and towns have a page of their own. Not a shortlist somebody decided was cool: close to every independent in the county, with chains the only thing left out. No star ratings. Where a place has been named by local sources, its page links to them.
Every one has its own page: what is there, on which street, and when it is open.
Every spot on Hot Tip is independently owned. A business can join and put something small on the table for people who show up, but it can't buy its way to being your tip. The day that changes, this stops being worth opening.
None of them change what you get shown. That is the point of them.
Save a place and it goes on your own list, sorted by what kind of place it is. Nobody else sees it. Not us on a leaderboard, not the business, and it never makes that spot more likely to come up again. The whole job of the tip is to send you somewhere you have not been.
Ask for coffee and you get coffee. Ask for nothing in particular and about one time in seven the answer is Sunset Cliffs twenty minutes before the sun goes, or the bridge on Spruce Street that bounces. It also means eleven at night on a Tuesday has an answer, because a cliff keeps no hours.
When a place has been named by San Diego Magazine, The Infatuation, San Diego Beer News, the San Diego Reader, Time Out, the San Diego Tourism Authority or one of 90 smaller publications, that shows on its page with a link to where it was said. So do the threads on 12 San Diego subreddits where it comes up, with how many there are. Found, never bought. A business cannot buy one and having one does not move it up the order. See the places that keep getting named.
For people who go out
It is open. Say what you feel like and go. A first name and an email is the whole sign-up, and the link we send is the whole account.
Free, forever. The app is at app.hottip.club, and hottip.club is its front door.
For businesses
If you run somewhere good and independent, you're probably already on the map. Claim it and set your own hours. Free, and it takes a minute.
Claim your placeHow it works for businesses