About WorldCafeMap

Each venue has its own page with whatever we hold for it: address, map position, opening hours, contact and social links, ratings and, for some venues, a menu link or a short description. What appears depends on what our sources hold, so some listings are fuller than others.

A listing combines data from the sources below.

• A starting set of listings, copied once from the coffee and café entries of a sister restaurant directory.
• OpenStreetMap: names, addresses, websites, phone numbers and opening hours entered by OpenStreetMap contributors.
• Google Maps listings: star ratings, rating counts, price level, opening hours, busy-times charts and the review excerpts shown on venue pages come from public Google Maps listing data.
• Venues' own websites: social media links, menu links, amenities, dietary options and short descriptions are read from a venue's own website. Where we show a venue's own words, they are quoted and attributed to its site.
• Open and public reference data: Wikipedia (text shown with CC BY-SA attribution), Wikidata (CC0), UK food hygiene ratings from the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland (UK venues only, shown as published), TripAdvisor's public rating and review count where we could match a venue by name and location, Foursquare Open Source Places (some contact details, in some countries), GeoNames (city names and populations) and FAO FAOSTAT (national coffee production figures).
• Specialty-coffee guides: European Coffee Trip and Sprudge Maps. A venue matched to an entry in either guide is marked specialty and shows an attributed badge on its page (see below).

Some venue descriptions are written by an AI language model, not by a person. The model is given only the facts stored for that venue, such as its type, location, rating and what it serves. Its text is checked automatically against those facts, and newer descriptions also get a second model check that looks for claims the facts do not support. If a check fails, or a venue has too little data, a plain template filled from the stored fields is shown instead.

Some editorial summaries on country, city and brand pages are also machine-written, from figures in our own database, such as venue counts and shares and, for brands, average rating and price split. They are checked automatically against those figures; brand summaries also get a second model check.

The themes customers mention, shown on venue pages, are found by keyword matching on the Google review text we hold and, for reviews in other languages, by a language model. They summarise what is mentioned; they are not quotations.

Where venue descriptions and guide texts exist in languages other than English, they are machine translations of the English text.

Ratings: the star rating and rating count on a venue page are the Google Maps figures as we last collected them. We do not average or adjust them. Reviews written by visitors on WorldCafeMap are shown separately and are not part of that figure.

Order: on city pages, venues an administrator has marked Featured come first, then venues are sorted by star rating (highest first) and then by number of ratings; visitors can re-sort the list. City “best” pages list the highest-rated venues first, using the number of ratings and then our internal completeness score as tie-breakers.

What gets listed: a venue appears in browse lists only if it has a Google rating or a completeness score of at least 10 out of 100. The score rewards fields such as a website, phone number, opening hours, address and rating. Venues below that bar are still reachable on their own page.

Venues whose Google listing looked empty on a re-check, or that could not be found on Google by name, are hidden from lists until a later check says otherwise. That is not a claim that they have closed.

Specialty flag: an automated signal, not an award or an inspection. It is set from signals such as a match with an entry in the European Coffee Trip or Sprudge Maps guides (similar name and within 300 metres), craft-coffee vocabulary on the venue's own website (for example “single origin”, “pour-over”, “cupping” or “direct trade”), or a “Great coffee” attribute on its Google listing.

Chain flag: a venue is treated as part of a chain if its name or brand matches our list of major coffee chains, or if its brand has at least 10 active locations in the directory. “Independent” on this site means not flagged as a chain.

Rankings: the worldwide Coffee Insights lists are computed from our own listing data, and each of those pages states the minimum number of venues it requires.

If something is wrong or missing, use “Report a problem” on the venue page (the options are permanently closed, not a coffee shop or café, duplicate listing, wrong details, or something else) or email hello@worldcafemap.com.

Venue owners can claim a listing and then edit its phone number, website, social links, description and opening hours. We approve claims before they take effect. You can also email us to ask for a fix.

Corrections policy: we review reports by hand. When an error is confirmed, we correct the listing, and a venue confirmed as permanently closed is taken off the active listings. The same applies to machine-written text: if a description states something the data does not support, tell us and we will correct or remove it.