Yates - Liverpool

You'll find Yates planted right on Queen Square, that stretch of Liverpool city centre where office workers, students, and locals all converge after work. It's the kind of place where you can nurse a pint for hours without anyone batting an eyelid—no Instagram-baiting cocktails, no craft beer snobbery, just straightforward drinking done well. The crowd's mixed and unpretentious: suits rubbing shoulders with students, groups of mates catching up on what they've been up to. Food's reliable rather than revelatory—the sort of thing you actually want when you're three pints in. With nearly 3,600 reviews, it's clearly doing something right, and that's because Yates knows what it is and doesn't try to be anything else.