Six bar complexes. One has a roof.

A night through all six, in the order the city lays them out

Start on Soi 7 or Soi 8 at about five, because that is when they are at their best: a stool a metre from Beach Road, the sea at the end of the soi, the bars open-fronted both sides and the staff out front being cheerful at you. It is the loosest kind of complex Pattaya has, two sois that behave like one long bar, and it is finished as a place to be by about nine, when the crowd it was built for has gone to dinner.

Take a baht bus up Second Road, off at Soi Buakhao, and walk into Tree Town at seven. It is the complex that is also a market: small bars around a courtyard, food stalls at the edges, a dozen speakers going at once, pool tables with games already in progress, and Rock Station at the back with a band. Eat here. The food is the best of any complex in the city and it is the one place where the bars are the second reason to come.

Walk east along Soi Buakhao and turn into LK Metro, which is a lane, sixty seconds end to end, and is a complex only in the sense that the bars on it belong together. Trench Town has reggae singers every night on a stage the size of a table. Stop for one. The go-go doorways either side will call to you and can be walked past.

The lane comes out on Soi Diana, and the Las Vegas sign is across the road. Ten bars down a walkway under one roof, air-conditioned to twenty degrees, a stage at the far end with a band on it from 9 PM to 1 AM. This is where the night ends, because it is the only complex of the six with a roof, a band six nights a week, and a closing time of three. The last bar on the right, beside the stage, is ours, and the seat three metres from the drummer is the point of the whole route.

Myth Night and Beer Bar Complex are the two you do not walk to. Myth Night, on Third Road, is the newest and by its reviews the least pushy, an open-air beer town with a stage that fills on weekends and is worth a taxi on a Saturday. Beer Bar Complex is a quiet corner almost nobody has rated, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on the night you want.

What makes a complex work, from inside one

A bar complex is a bet that people would rather choose between ten bars from a walkway than walk a street to find them. It works when three things line up: a reason to enter that is not any single bar, enough difference between the bars that choosing means something, and a reason to stay past the first drink. Walking Street has none of these, which is why it is a street and not a complex. Tree Town has the first two in its market and its pool tables and lacks the third. The hall we are in has all three, and the third is the band.

The band is what a roof lets you do. An open courtyard cannot have one stage everybody faces, because the sound goes up and the crowd spreads; it has a dozen speakers instead. A hall with walls can point its speakers down the room and put a band at the end of it, and then every bar in the hall has the band without paying for it. The ten bars inside Las Vegas Beer Garden are ten different rooms in one sense and one room in another, and the second sense is the one that fills the tables.

The cost of a roof is that you cannot see the street, and the reward is that the street cannot see you. The complexes that are open to the sky are complexes you fall into on your way somewhere; ours is one you decide to enter, which changes who is in it. The reviews of the hall use the words "no hassle" more than the reviews of any open-fronted complex in the city, and the reason is the gate. You walk through it on purpose.

Where to sit inside a complex is the other thing nobody tells you. The front bars in any complex are the ones that catch people who have just arrived, and they are the ones with the most staff out front. The bars at the back are the ones people find on their second visit, and they are where the regulars are. In the hall, the back is the stage, and the bar beside the stage is bar ten of ten. This page ranks the complexes. The one it is written from is at the back of the one it ranks first, and you can weigh that as you like.

The ten bars in ours, by position, without naming favourites

Bar one is on the left as you come through the gate and bar ten is on the right beside the stage, and the numbers go up the left side and down the right, which nobody uses and everybody understands. The first two on each side are the bars that catch arrivals: the most staff out front, the most stools facing the walkway, the quietest sound because the speakers point away from them. If you want the band as a background and a conversation as the point, these are your bars, and on a Saturday they are where the people who came for the cold and not the music are sitting.

The middle bars, three and four on each side, are where the speakers are aimed, and they are the loudest seats in the building by a margin. The pool table is on the left about here. The middle is where the groups go, because the tables are bigger and the noise makes a group feel like a party, and it is where the reviews that complain about volume were written. It is also the part of the hall that empties first in a break, because from here the screens above our counter are the only thing to look at.

The last bar on each side is beside the stage. On the left is the bar whose tables face ours across the stage steps, and whose regulars we wave to. On the right is us: the tables along the stage edge, the rows behind, the counter with the harp on it, and the toilets, which are next to us and are everybody's. The complex's own site describes all ten from the front. We describe the walk to the back, and the walk is four minutes on a Saturday and one on a Tuesday.

Reading a complex's reviews before you go

A bar complex gets reviewed twice: once as a building, on the complex's own Google listing, and once bar by bar, on each bar's listing, if the bar has bothered to make one. The building's reviews are the ones to read first, because they tell you what the place is for. The hall's say "live music," "air-conditioned" and "no hassle," in that order and in most reviews, which tells you it is a room for a band in the cold where nobody bothers you. Tree Town's say "food," "atmosphere" and "pool," which tells you it is a market with stools. LK Metro's say "walk through." Myth Night's say "new" and "not pushy."

Then read one bar's reviews inside the complex, and read them for the pattern rather than the incident. A bar in a hall of ten gets rated for the hall by people who had a bad twenty minutes at the bar next door, and rated for itself by the people who sat at its counter. Our own reviews, which the reviews page reads closely, are mostly about the seat beside the stage and the pour, and a few are about the cold, and one is about the toilets, which are next to us and were, that night, not ours to fix.

The rule this page ranks by is stated at the top so you can argue with it: Google's rating weighted by review count, for the best-rated bar Google places inside each complex, with the distance from our counter in every entry. It puts the hall first because the numbers do. We would have put it first anyway, and we have said so, which is the only honest way to rank a list that has your own building on it.