✦ Queens, counted

Queens by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Queens, 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 2,463 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 4.4 — that badge is worn by 255 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. Glen Oaks is 19.1× more Indian 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 48; the median $$$$ place scores 48. Four dollar signs buys you 0 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
$	1,151	48	166
$$	1,027	55	277
$$$	29	58	491
$$$$	29	48	163

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 2,827. 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
Chinese	413	46	158,981
Deli	327	49	45,341
Coffee	292	44	139,570
Dessert	230	39	73,305
Bakery	214	52	67,029
American	187	46	88,897
Pizza	183	51	92,816
Bar & Grill	156	56	46,115
Halal	150	60	74,221
Asian	149	50	97,371
Fast Food	144	34	107,994
Caribbean	133	48	69,052
Korean	130	54	69,640
Latin	110	52	55,379
Indian	109	46	53,889
Burgers	105	42	110,711
Mexican	105	49	44,872
Japanese	97	57	67,363

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
Queens, NY	2,827	49	3%	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 →