Two beer gardens. Neither is a garden.

An evening at each, so you can tell them apart before the taxi

The pier, from five. You walk out along Walking Street before the strip has woken up, turn onto the pier, and the sea is on three sides of a wooden deck with a few hundred tables on it. The menu is long and Thai and Western and the point of it is the table at the sea end, before sunset, with the bay going orange and the boats coming in from the islands. The band comes on after dark and plays to a crowd that is eating. It is a restaurant with a view and a band, and it is the best version of that in the city. By ten the strip behind you is loud and you are on a pier in the dark with the lights of Jomtien across the water.

The hall, from six. You walk in off Soi Diana through a gate and the temperature drops fifteen degrees in two metres. A walkway runs ninety metres with five bars a side and a stage at the end. Nobody is eating, though plates from across the soi come to the tables at the back if you ask. The point is the stage, and from nine until 1 AM there is a band on it, six nights a week, playing to the whole building. The seats along its edge are ours. By ten the hall is full to the middle and loud, and by midnight the room at the front is singing.

They are two kilometres and ten minutes apart, they share two words, and they have nothing else in common. The pier is a dinner. The hall is a night. Google conflates them because of the name, and a share of the people who walk through our gate on a Friday were looking for the other one, which is fine, because they stay.

What people get wrong, and the order to do them in

The first mistake is the name. "Beer garden" in Pattaya does not mean a garden; there is no grass at either. It means a big room with a lot of tables in it, and the pier and the hall are the two biggest. Myth Night on Third Road calls itself Beer Town, which is more honest, and the three beer bar complexes in the list below are the same idea at a smaller scale with no band.

The second mistake is the search. "Is Pattaya Beer Garden closed" is typed every day by people who have been sent to the hall by Google and found a hall, or sent to the pier on a night the weather closed it. Both are open on the day this page was checked, at the hours in the table, and neither is the other. If the taxi driver asks which one, say the pier or say Soi Diana, and do not say beer garden.

The third is the order. Do the pier first, because it is a sunset and sunset is at half past six, and do the hall second, because it is a band and the band is at nine and plays until 1 AM. A baht bus up Second Road from the Walking Street end, off at the Soi 13 turning, three minutes on foot to the Las Vegas sign, and you have done both beer gardens in a night and can tell people which is which. The last bar on the right, beside the stage, will have a table one row back if you are there by nine, and the counter if you are not.

We run a bar in one of them and have put the other first in the table, because the honest comparison is that they are for different hours and the pier's hour comes first.

A week in the hall, since the pier does not have one

The pier is the same every night: sunset, dinner, the band after dark, and a crowd that is eating. The hall changes with the day, and if you are choosing between the two on a given night, the day matters. Monday the complex's DJ has the stage, the hall runs at about half, and the tables along the stage edge are empty at eight; Monday is the DJ night. Tuesday starts the band’s six-night run, from 9 PM until 1 AM.

Thursday is the regulars' night, when the table near our counter fills with the people who could come any night and choose this one. Friday is the night the tables along the stage edge are gone by half past seven and somebody arrives at ten past eight and asks if we can do anything. Saturday is the fullest, and the night at eleven when the whole front of the hall stands up in the third song of the late set. Sunday the band plays the room rather than the set, and the requests it would not risk on a Friday get tried.

So: the pier on any night, for the sunset and the dinner, because the pier does not change. The hall on the night that suits you, because it does. The two together in one evening, in that order, on a Wednesday or a Sunday, is the version we would choose for someone who has one night and wants both.

What the word means, and why we do not mind it

A beer garden in Munich is a garden with beer in it, under chestnut trees, with a brass band and a thousand-litre keg and a tradition older than the country we are in. Neither of Pattaya's has a tree. The pier has the sea, the hall has a roof, and both have a band, and that is the whole of the resemblance. The word came to Thailand as a way of saying "a big room with a lot of tables and beer," and it stuck, and the two places that use it in Pattaya are the two biggest such rooms.

We do not mind. The word gets typed into a map by people looking for exactly what the hall is: somewhere large, cold, with a band, where you can sit for a night rather than an hour. It also gets typed by people looking for the pier, who end up at the gate on Soi Diana and stay, which is a thing the pier presumably experiences in reverse. The two places have never been connected and have never, to our knowledge, spoken; the confusion is Google's, and this page exists to end it.

For the record and for the taxi: Pattaya Beer Garden is on the pier at the sea end of Walking Street, in South Pattaya. Las Vegas Beer Garden is a hall on Soi Diana, off Second Road at the Soi 13 turning, in Central Pattaya. Say the street, not the word. We are the last bar on the right in the second one, beside the stage.