✦ Manhattan, counted

Manhattan by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Manhattan, 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 6,730 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

75% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.4 — that badge is worn by 977 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. Koreatown is 46.3× more Korean 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 55. Four dollar signs buys you 9 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
$	2,289	46	265
$$	3,164	51	586
$$$	369	58	691
$$$$	462	55	594

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 7,219. 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	1,266	47	835,635
Bar & Grill	1,015	51	890,682
Deli	568	43	195,689
Bakery	556	47	452,080
Italian	513	53	617,924
Dessert	501	46	348,057
American	468	49	606,014
Pizza	420	50	459,655
Breakfast & Brunch	413	39	405,638
Japanese	398	54	359,309
Chinese	379	46	316,584
Mexican	327	47	303,383
Asian	281	56	327,808
Burgers	241	40	480,052
Seafood	235	52	376,387
Sushi	220	54	157,138
Latin	197	56	212,853
Fast Food	197	34	208,842

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
Manhattan, NY	7,219	50	13%	424

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 →