Coming alone, honestly, in a city that assumes you are
Pattaya assumes a person on their own is a man on his own looking for company, and a large part of the city is built to sell it to him. That is the reputation, it is not a lie, and it is not what this page is about. This page is for the person, of either sex, who is here alone and wants a night out that does not involve buying one: a stool at a counter with something in front of it, a room that will talk to you if you want and leave you alone if you do not, and a walk home that is safe at one in the morning, which in Central Pattaya it is.
The rule for a room that works alone is the counter. A table is for a group; a counter is for one, and a counter with a stage in front of it or a game on it is a counter with something to look at that is not your phone. Every one of the eight on this page has one. The reggae bar with the open stage on LK Metro, where somebody will hand you a tambourine. The pool table with a game going, where the next name on the chalk is yours. The rock room where everyone faces the same way, so nobody is looking at you. And ours: eight stools, a stage three metres in front, a tap at your elbow and Save or Bank on the other side with time to talk.
The honest warning is the front bars of any complex and the open-fronted bars on Soi Buakhao, where a person alone is a target for a conversation they did not ask for. It is friendly, mostly, and it is a sale. The rooms on this page are the rooms where it does not happen, and the reason ours is on the list is the reviews, which say "no pushy sales" more often than they say anything else.
A night alone, from six until the walk home
Six: the counter, when it opens, is the coldest and quietest seat in the city, and Save has nothing to do but pour and talk. This is the hour to find out what the night is. Seven: eat, at the counter, from a plate that came across the soi. Half past seven on a band night, a stool with the stage in front of it, before the tables behind you fill and the counter becomes standing room. Eight: the house lights drop and the drummer counts in, and for forty minutes nobody in the building is alone, including you.
In the break, walk. LK Metro is ninety seconds away and Trench Town's reggae singers will be on; stand at the back for one song. Come back for the second set, which is the loud one, and which is better from the counter than from anywhere else in the hall because from the counter you can see the whole room react. By eleven on a Saturday the stools are gone and the standing room behind them is the best place in the building to be one person, because from there you are part of a crowd without belonging to a table.
Late, the room thins and the people left are the regulars, who are the friendliest people in the city and the least interested in selling you anything. The late set is played to them and, if you stayed, to you. The walk home along Soi Diana at one is lit, busy and safe. Most of the people who come alone once come alone again, and by the third time they have a stool that is, by habit, theirs. Some of them are at the Thursday table now.
