✦ East Village, counted

East Village by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in East Village, 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 363 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

81% 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 69 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. East Village is 3× 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 51; the median $$$$ place scores 55. Four dollar signs buys you 4 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
$	107	51	355
$$	203	60	646
$$$	17	67	857
$$$$	20	55	394

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 372. 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
Bar & Grill	96	43	55,618
Coffee	48	69	42,973
Japanese	33	56	34,260
American	26	60	24,822
Bakery	25	63	24,352
Chinese	25	52	20,651
Italian	24	64	30,988
Dessert	22	62	14,065
Asian	20	66	21,490
Pizza	18	54	21,404
Mediterranean	13	57	17,720
Indian	12	69	11,796
Deli	11	40	2,594
Latin	11	73	12,672
Breakfast & Brunch	11	60	6,456
Mexican	10	52	4,826
Halal	10	51	10,905
Burgers	10	67	19,218

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 →