Frenchtown is also where St. Thomas's bar scene has its most authentic face. A cluster of small waterfront bars lines the Frenchtown harbour, where fishing boats tie up and pelicans patrol the dock. These are the kinds of places where you can sit on a stool, order a Dark and Stormy or a Cruzan rum on the rocks, and watch the boats drift past without feeling like you're in a stage set built for tourists.
The drinks to order on St. Thomas are rum-based — the US Virgin Islands have their own Cruzan distillery on St. Croix, and the rum is cheap and widely available. Painkiller cocktails (dark rum, coconut cream, pineapple juice, orange juice) are a Caribbean staple and legitimately good when made well. The Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the BVI is where the Painkiller was invented, but you can find them everywhere in the islands.
Happy hours are a fixture of island life: most bars run them from around 4pm to 6pm, timed loosely to the cooling of the afternoon and the departure of the cruise ships. The bar at Paradise Point, reached by the Skyride cable car above Charlotte Amalie, is a tourist operation but the sunset views over the harbour make it worth one drink.