✦ Suffolk, counted

Suffolk by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Suffolk County, 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 3,895 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

71% 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 495 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. Stony Brook is 9.8× more Vietnamese 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 59. Four dollar signs buys you 11 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
$	1,652	48	190
$$	1,551	55	284
$$$	122	58	276
$$$$	71	59	317

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 4,299. 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	534	47	88,410
Coffee	520	44	156,556
Dessert	420	41	80,457
Bakery	419	48	99,037
Pizza	408	51	151,129
Bar & Grill	357	54	101,995
American	353	51	148,277
Italian	325	56	151,673
Breakfast & Brunch	281	46	166,403
Mexican	278	46	122,507
Chinese	252	45	53,485
Fast Food	252	31	145,917
Burgers	198	40	154,487
Latin	197	52	70,758
Seafood	183	50	128,494
Bagels	153	44	40,635
Japanese	146	54	67,222
Asian	119	50	37,864

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
Suffolk County, NY	4,299	50	6%	197

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 →