Jazz kissa, listening bars, hi-fi cafes and the restaurants that put a system before a wine list — indexed one room at a time, in the cities where the form actually took hold.
A room qualifies when the playback system is the reason it exists. That covers a 1920s kissa with chairs bolted in rows, a Dalston bar running seventies Klipschorns behind izakaya plates, and a Gowanus venue with a hand-built horn system and a dancefloor. It does not cover a good bar that happens to own a turntable.
Every room carries a talking policy, because that is the single thing most likely to ruin your evening if you get it wrong. Silent means silent. Conversational means the record is not the only thing happening.
Curation over coverage. A hundred and fifty rooms we can vouch for are worth more than three thousand scraped listings, so entries are written by hand and start as drafts. Nothing appears on the map until a person has decided it belongs there.
Where a description comes from published guides rather than our own visit, the entry says so and the verification date stays empty. When we have been to a room, it carries the date we went. We would rather be visibly incomplete than quietly wrong.
Photographs come from the venues’ own sites and press material, credited and linked back to the source on every image. We write to each venue to ask permission, and we take a photograph down on request, immediately and without argument — a note to the address below is enough.
Hours change, systems get rebuilt, rooms close. If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed the same week. Venue owners who want their entry corrected, expanded or removed get priority.