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Break a rule and we are finished.
Anonymous twice. Paid always. Forty-eight points, no curve. Demotion is a feature — a guide that only promotes is an advertisement with better fonts.
Anonymous twice. Paid always. Scored on four dimensions to 48 points. No comps, no placements, no affiliate links. Cafes that want a better rank get a better cup — not a better relationship with us.
Issue 01 published thirty research files and zero final scores on purpose. We would rather look unfinished than look bought. The rules below are what turn the shortlist into a ranking — and what keep us from becoming the thing we built this site against.
01Anonymous visits, always.
No press visits. No introductions. No "we're writing about you." We walk in like every other customer, order what an actual customer would order, pay what an actual customer would pay, and leave. Twice minimum. At different times of day. Ideally with different baristas working the bar.
The reason is not paranoia — it is that the moment a cafe knows we are auditing, the audit is over. Beans come fresher, the dialled-in barista takes the shot, the music turns down, and we stop measuring the room. We measure the performance. Pattaya is small; owners talk. We still do it anyway — because a guide that cheats on visit one is worthless on visit two.
02Paid bills, no exceptions.
Every cup, every croissant, every bottle of water on this site was paid for at the menu price by an editor with their own card or cash. No comp drinks. No "on the house". No "for the editor". No press passes. No PR-arranged tastings. No affiliate links.
When a cafe insists on comping a drink — and a few have — we leave the menu price in cash on the counter and decline politely. The bill goes in the file. The file is auditable.
03Four-dimension rating, scored 0 to 12 each.
Every cafe in the Pattaya Coffee 30 is rated on the same four dimensions, weighted equally, totalled to 48. Here is the rubric:
Craft
How well is the coffee made? Espresso extraction quality. Pour-over technique. Milk steaming. Water temperature. Grind consistency. The mechanical and sensory craft of cup making.
Consistency
Does the cup taste the same on a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon? Two different baristas, same drink — within tasting tolerance? Operational discipline is what separates cafes that punch above their setup from cafes that get lucky on the audit visit.
Value
Price for what you get. A great pour-over at ฿110 scores higher than the same pour-over at ฿180. We are not anti-premium pricing — we are pro-honest pricing. Beach-Road specialty at Bangkok-suburb prices is a value flag.
Return frequency
Would the editors come back when not auditing? This is the highest-signal dimension we measure. If we are paying our own bills and still ordering coffee here, that beats any ranking metric.
04No money changes hands. Not now, not later.
We do not sell:
- Placement on the ranking
- Inclusion in the directory
- "Featured" upsells
- Sponsored entries
- Affiliate links to cafes or roasters
- Editorial favouritism in any form
Cafe owners have offered each of these. We have declined every one. The ranking moves only when the coffee moves. That is the only economic model this site has.
The moment a guide can be bought, it stops being a guide. It becomes a directory of who paid the most. We're not building that.
05Conflicts of interest.
The editors do not own, work for, consult to, or hold financial interest in any Pattaya cafe, roaster, importer, or coffee equipment business. We do not write paid reviews elsewhere. We do not accept gifted equipment. If any of this changes, we will disclose it on this page and on the affected cafe's entry within seven days.
06Demotions, removals, and research kills.
A cafe on this site is not a lifetime appointment. Research candidates can be deleted after one visit if the cup is not coffee-first. Published previews can drop when visit two fails consistency. Top contenders can lose rank #01 if the second afternoon proves the first was luck.
We publish the doubt early so the demotion later is not a surprise — it is the method working. Removing a bakery that happens to serve Boncafe is as valid an audit outcome as promoting a trailer cafe on Pratumnak hill. If you only wanted a list that never shrinks, you wanted a directory, not us.
07Corrections.
Coffee programs change. Owners sell. Baristas leave. A cafe rated 47/48 in May can drop to 39/48 by November. We re-audit each cafe in the Pattaya Coffee 30 at the start of every season and republish the ranking.
If you spot an error — wrong address, wrong hours, wrong dish name, wrong price — email [email protected] or see /corrections. We correct quickly and note material changes on the affected entry and in the public corrections log when ranks move.
08Privacy.
This site does not run third-party advertising trackers. We do not sell visitor data. The newsletter signup, when it ships, will use a privacy-first provider and store nothing beyond email address and timestamp. No retargeting, no behavioral profiling, no third-party pixels.
09What we are not.
We are not a comprehensive directory of every coffee shop in Pattaya. We are not a chain review site. We are not paid travel media. We are not a barista certification authority. We are not Sprudge. We are not the Specialty Coffee Association of Thailand. We are not affiliated with the Tourism Authority of Thailand. We are not paid by anyone.
Issue 01 is written and audited by the editor-in-chief. The team grows for Issue 02 — anonymous-visit editors will be added once the founding rubric has been applied, paid for, and shown to work. We do not invent a staff list to look bigger than we are.
Last updated: , Issue 01 (pre-audit; scorecards still at zero).
Next scheduled review: When the first scorecard files, then at Issue 02 launch.
Questions about these standards: [email protected] · Colophon · Brand kit · Sitemap
05Filing a scorecard
After two anonymous visits with paid bills, scores are filed in data/index.json via npm run scorecard (see repo scripts/file-scorecard.mjs). Each cafe gets four integers (0–12) for Craft, Consistency, Value, and Return — max 48. Until that runs, the cafe page stays in pre-audit state and ranks remain provisional.
Rank moves, removals, and factual fixes publish at /corrections. We do not change scores because an owner asks nicely.