Most of what we publish is about what goes wrong. This one is not. Out of 328 London cafés we measured, a small group answers every single review that arrives — and since Google reviews are public, anyone can check the count for themselves.
Every review we read had a reply
These six answered all of the most recent reviews we could read on their listing, without exception.
- Ziggy Green — Mayfair · 37 of 37
- Camden Food Co, Euston — Camden · 33 of 33
- The Full English — Hackney · 34 of 34
- Guillam Coffee House — South Kensington · 33 of 33
- Premises Cafe & Bistro — Hackney · 34 of 34
- PAUL, Gloucester Road — Kensington · 40 of 40
And these missed almost nothing
- Black Sheep Coffee, Goodge Street — Fitzrovia · 41 of 42
- Yolé Desserts — Shoreditch · 47 of 48
- Eggslut — Shoreditch · 43 of 44
- Black Sheep Coffee — Wandsworth · 38 of 39
- WatchHouse — Seven Dials · 37 of 38
- The Black Penny — Sloane Square · 40 of 44
For context: 187 of the 328 cafés we measured had replied to none of their recent reviews. Answering everything is not the norm in London. It is a decision somebody made and then kept making, on a Tuesday afternoon, between orders.
Why we re-counted before publishing this
Our first pass read only eight or nine reviews per café — enough to see whether a business replies at all, not enough to put its name in a headline. Nine replies in a row can hide five hundred ignored ones.
So we went back and read thirty to fifty reviews for each candidate. It changed the list. One café that looked like a perfect replier in the shallow pass turned out to have answered none of its last forty-two — the handful we happened to read the first time were simply the ones it had replied to. It is not on this list, and we are not naming it, because the mistake was ours, not theirs.
What answering everything actually looks like
Replying to all of them does not automatically mean replying well — some of the cafés above reuse a sentence, and one of them pushes people to email. But they are in a different conversation from the 187 London cafés that say nothing. You cannot improve a reply that was never written.
Since this was written
This piece was written from the London count. We have since read the same thing in 18 cities: 14,130 replies from 914 cafés across 90 neighbourhoods. The London figures above are left as they were measured — the answer rate in particular cannot be recomputed, because outside London we only read reviews that already carried a reply.
What the wider count changed, and what it did not: the shape of the problem held. Across all 18 cities, 51 per cent of replies still share no distinctive word with the review above them, and 8 per cent still break at least one check. What grew was the repetition figure — 664 sentences now appear at two or more separate businesses, with the most repeated closing line turning up at 68 cafés spread across every city we read.
In other words: London was not unusual. It was representative.
What answering everything does not fix
Replying to every review is the hard part, and these cafés have done it. It is worth being clear about what it does not automatically buy. Across the wider corpus we later read — 14,130 replies from 914 cafés — 51 per cent of replies share no distinctive word with the review above them. Diligence and specificity are different problems.
Some of the cafés on this list reuse a sentence. That is not hypocrisy; it is what happens when one person answers forty reviews in an evening. But it is measurable, and 664 sentences in the corpus now appear at two or more separate businesses.
The order these problems come in
Silence first, then sameness, then substance. A café that answers nothing has one problem and it is the big one. A café that answers everything with the same line has a smaller, more fixable problem. A café that answers everything with something specific has, as far as we can measure, no problem at all — and there are very few of them.
What it costs to answer everything
A café with a busy listing receives more reviews in a month than most owners expect. Answering all of them is not a five-minute job, and the median reply in our corpus runs to 22 words — short, but not nothing when there are forty of them.
That is the honest reason most cafés do not do it, and it is a better reason than indifference. The businesses on this list have decided the listing is worth an evening a month. Whether that is a good trade depends on how many people read it before choosing where to eat, and that number is larger than it feels.
The one thing worth copying from them
Not the volume. The habit of answering the ordinary ones. Most cafés that reply at all reply to the disasters and the raves and leave the middle alone — and the middle is where most reviews live, and where a specific sentence is cheapest to write.
Method
328 pure cafés across 24 London neighbourhoods, read from live Google listings in August 2026. Candidates were shortlisted from the first pass, then re-read individually at up to fifty reviews each; only cafés where we could read at least twenty reviews are listed. The counts above are of the reviews we read, newest first — not of every review the business has ever received. Anyone can verify them: the replies are on the listings.