✦ Boerum Hill, counted
Boerum Hill by the numbers.
Every restaurant we track in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn — measured on exactly the same scale as every other street in the region, which is the only way these figures mean anything next to anybody else’s.
The reason this site exists
Star averages can't tell anyone apart
73% 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 23 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 19 bands instead of one.
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. Boerum Hill is 5.4× 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.
The question everybody asks
Does spending more get you a better meal?
A little, and then it stops. The median $ place scores 57; the median $$$$ place scores 86. Four dollar signs buys you 29 points — on a scale where the gap between #1 and #50 in a single town is bigger than that.
| Price | Places | Median Sweet Score | Median ratings |
|---|---|---|---|
| $ | 44 | 57 | 264 |
| $$ | 56 | 60 | 468 |
| $$$ | 1 | 91 | 435 |
| $$$$ | 2 | 86 | 152 |
The categories
What this region is made of
Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 125. 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 | 24 | 58 | 10,793 |
| Deli | 16 | 66 | 3,932 |
| Bar & Grill | 14 | 52 | 5,169 |
| Bakery | 10 | 62 | 7,234 |
| Pizza | 9 | 78 | 3,477 |
| Dessert | 8 | 60 | 6,260 |
| Italian | 6 | 82 | 3,632 |
| Mexican | 6 | 79 | 2,222 |
| Halal | 6 | 73 | 4,136 |
| French | 5 | 58 | 4,754 |
| Japanese | 5 | 84 | 1,816 |
| Burgers | 5 | 60 | 4,542 |
| American | 4 | 64 | 2,248 |
| Breakfast & Brunch | 4 | 54 | 2,750 |
| Chinese | 4 | 72 | 2,825 |
| Juice Bars | 3 | 70 | 650 |
| Vietnamese | 3 | 57 | 922 |
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.
- Mia's Brooklyn BakeryBoerum Hill · 3,667 ratings66
- BareburgerBoerum Hill · 1,877 ratings70
- No pork halal kitchenBoerum Hill · 1,739 ratings63
- Mile End DeliBoerum Hill · 1,437 ratings67
- Bijan'sBoerum Hill · 1,413 ratings57
- French LouieBoerum Hill · 1,348 ratings60
- RucolaBoerum Hill · 1,332 ratings39
- The Soul SpotBoerum Hill · 1,319 ratings46
- JoyaBoerum Hill · 1,269 ratings40
- Bar TabacBoerum Hill · 1,259 ratings21
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.
- 43Outdoor seating
- 95Deliver
- 111Do takeout
- 35Take reservations
- 51Vegetarian options
- 65Good for kids
- 36Work for groups
- 9Allow dogs