✦ Brooklyn, counted

Brooklyn by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Brooklyn, 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 6,904 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

66% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.5 — that badge is worn by 875 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. Brighton Beach is 56.6× more Eastern European 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 46; the median $$$$ place scores 64. Four dollar signs buys you 18 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
$	3,118	46	160
$$	2,938	56	282
$$$	144	63	424
$$$$	117	64	258

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 7,921. 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
Coffee	1,166	51	437,613
Deli	996	47	106,191
Bar & Grill	812	55	286,048
Bakery	745	52	213,641
Chinese	590	43	157,365
Dessert	531	38	168,600
Pizza	518	49	280,364
Mexican	488	49	194,802
American	363	47	238,533
Japanese	287	55	137,495
Italian	275	56	198,075
Breakfast & Brunch	274	47	174,197
Fast Food	259	34	206,857
Burgers	255	40	262,573
Seafood	220	35	148,516
Asian	201	44	94,674
Halal	195	58	116,173
Caribbean	177	42	104,689

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
Brooklyn, NY	7,921	50	4%	182

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 →