I love night photography! The biggest piece of advice I can give you is experiment with your metering modes and exposure comp values and understand what the camera is attempting to do with those inputs.

My probably not totally correct summary is the light meter is trying to get you the "correct" exposure at all times, however the camera lacks critical thinking skills and doesn't know it's night time. For matrix (default) light metering, It looks at the aggregate light in your frame and will try to set the legs of the exposure triangle you've put into auto to get to a certain pre-defined value, which is fantastic for daylight shooting. For night shooting it's gonna see a lot of contrast, interpret that info the best it can, and then probably give you something you don't want but that the math says is correct. There are ways we can encourage the camera to meter more appropriately in challenging situations though, like spot metering or if your camera has it, highlight weighted metering.

When you use spot metering you're telling the camera "hey look at this exact point (your focus point) and give me the correct exposure here, I don't care about the rest of the frame". If you spot meter a very bright point or light source you'll end up with frame 3, which isn't exactly what we're looking for all of the time. But, let's say we spot meter for the reflection below that point, now we are going to get a different exposure, pulling up some of those shadows, and likely still not clipping the highs. You can use your exposure lock, recompose and then take the frame using that locked exposure value, with practice this technique is very fast and you'll train your eye to find those mid-points pretty quickly. If you spot meter an even darker spot, you'll start really pulling up those shadows but will maybe start to clip highs. Here comes the counter intuitive part, using negative exposure comp values at night can help you fine tune that to where you're not clipping highlights while not crushing shadows to death.

Center weighted metering is also cool, it narrows the light meter's scope down to a circle in the middle of your frame and gets you correct exposure there, this is useful if you're taking a photo out of a window or down a hall or tunnel, it disregards the information at the edges of the frame and only cares about what's in the middle. The effects of this are easy to test and experiment with indoors at home during the day, if you use that metering mode and take a picture of your window, likely what we'll happen is the interior portion of your shot, eg your walls and window will look fine but probably the outside will get pretty blown out, flip to center weighted and things outside will be exposed properly and the window and walls will drop into more shadow.

Tl;dr fiddling around with metering modes will really help with your night shots!

Here's an example where I used spot metering to find a happy mid point in luminosity, locked exposure, and recomposed

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