✦ The Bronx, counted

The Bronx by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in The Bronx, NY, measured on the same scale as everywhere else — which is the only way a number from here means anything next to a number from anywhere else.

Median Sweet Scoreacross 2,323 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

60% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.3 — that badge is worn by 284 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 20 bands instead of one.

Star average — one spike, no separation

Sweet Score — the same places, actually spread out

How the Sweet Score is built →

Where a street has a specialty

The blocks that are actually known for something

Not folklore — arithmetic. For every neighbourhood we ask what share of its restaurants belong to a category, and compare that to the same category’s share of the whole region. Laconia is 31.7× more African than the region average. These are the streets you go to on purpose.

Bars are the multiple against the regional average. Every town →

What people actually order

The 16 dishes reviewers name most

Pulled from what reviewers wrote, not from menus. If a dish shows up here it’s because people kept bringing it up unprompted — which is the only kind of recommendation worth anything.

All the dishes →

The question everybody asks

Does spending more get you a better meal?

A little, and then it stops. The median $ place scores 49; the median $$$$ place scores 64. Four dollar signs buys you 15 points — on a scale where the gap between #1 and #50 in a single town is bigger than that.

Price	Places	Median Sweet Score	Median ratings
$	1,361	49	136
$$	691	55	208
$$$	20	64	413
$$$$	14	64	309

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 2,943. The median column is the honest one — a category with a lot of places and a low median is a category where picking badly is easy.

Category	Places	Median score	Ratings behind it
Deli	535	52	44,363
Coffee	260	42	132,359
Pizza	259	52	78,714
Mexican	258	50	69,473
Chinese	220	44	45,778
American	217	46	103,050
Fast Food	201	35	154,585
Dessert	194	39	52,468
Bakery	187	52	44,998
Burgers	126	38	146,086
Bar & Grill	118	55	31,117
Latin	116	48	76,910
Seafood	108	43	113,356
Italian	90	62	53,112
Breakfast & Brunch	89	49	75,896
Halal	89	54	25,042
Caribbean	68	50	43,527
Juice Bars	55	52	7,848

Every ranking →

Where the food is

The 15 densest places to eat

Restaurants per named town or neighbourhood. Manhattan neighbourhoods are small and stacked, which is exactly why they dominate this list.

Borough by borough

The seven counties, side by side

Same measurement everywhere. The 'pricey' column is the share of places charging $$$ or more — it's the closest thing to a cost-of-dinner map we have.

County	Places	Median score	$$$ or more	Median ratings
The Bronx, NY	2,943	49	2%	114

The list nobody else can build

Loved, and almost nobody knows

High Sweet Score, barely any ratings. These are the places where the people who have been are near-unanimous and the crowd hasn’t arrived. This is what a percentile can find and a star average can’t.

The other end

The most-rated restaurants in the region

Volume, not quality — though the two turn out to be less related than anyone expects. These are the places everybody has an opinion about.

What the board can do for you

Counted, so you can filter by it

Every one of these is a list. Outdoor seating in August, somewhere that takes a reservation, somewhere that will let the dog sit down too.

Every filter →