✦ Chelsea, counted

Chelsea by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Chelsea, Manhattan — 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.

Median Sweet Scoreacross 351 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

76% 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 50 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. Chelsea is 3.4× more Vegetarian 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 45. Four dollar signs buys you -1 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
$	111	46	323
$$	176	51	606
$$$	21	78	1,038
$$$$	29	45	415

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 376. 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	65	46	40,823
Bar & Grill	63	42	46,107
Italian	31	62	31,033
Bakery	31	49	28,838
Dessert	24	48	10,691
Pizza	24	46	29,203
American	23	44	18,650
Japanese	23	66	23,819
Deli	22	34	3,566
Breakfast & Brunch	19	36	22,709
Mediterranean	16	54	22,655
Mexican	16	60	19,501
Asian	16	73	31,703
Sushi	16	64	13,606
Chinese	15	65	25,924
Seafood	13	76	36,979
Latin	12	62	12,279
Burgers	9	57	14,768

Every ranking →

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 →