Find Me Matcha

Find the good stuff.

Every café that actually serves matcha, what grade they pour, and what it’s like to sit there.

An iPhone app, starting in Copenhagen. It is not on the App Store yet — there is no download link here because a link that goes nowhere is worse than none.

A map that says how much it knows

Most café apps give you one number and leave you to guess where it came from. This one is built the other way round. Every claim on a café page carries who made it, in the first word:

2 people confirmed

Two or more people who went said the same thing. This is the strongest claim the app makes. Nothing is ever called verified, because nothing is — people agreed.

We think so

We read it off the café’s own website and nobody has confirmed it in person. We own the guess; the café never made the claim.

People disagree

Two people who went said different things. The app shows the disagreement rather than picking a winner.

Nobody’s been yet

Never hidden. A café nobody has been to is the most useful one to visit, and hiding it would make the map a list of places already covered.

Two scores, never averaged into one

A café gets a Matcha score and a Room score, side by side. They pull against each other — the best matcha in the city is often poured through a cramped takeaway window, and the loveliest room often serves a culinary-grade latte. Blending them would rate both of those a 3.5 and tell nobody anything.

Below three contributions a café shows no number at all. It says how many ratings it has instead. An invented 3.0 for a place nobody has visited is the fastest way to lose your trust in every other number on the screen.

Built out of what people report

Café locations, opening hours and the practical details come from OpenStreetMap. Everything about the matcha comes from people: a rating, a photo, a tap on a yes/no question at the counter, a correction when something is out of date. The app asks one short question at a time, because you are standing in the café and it is not.

Where it works, and in which languages

Copenhagen first, and only inside cities the app carries — propose a café outside one and it will tell you so rather than quietly dropping it.

The app is in English, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, and follows your phone’s language unless you pick one. Reviews and bios other people wrote are never translated by us; the app hands them to your phone to translate on the device, and says so when it does.

What it costs

Nothing. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase and no advertising. There are no ad-tracking SDKs, and your data is never sold. What the app does collect is set out in the privacy policy, in detail rather than in the abstract.

Anything else