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 who say nothing. You cannot improve a reply that was never written.
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.