✦ Flatiron, counted

Flatiron by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Flatiron, 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 152 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

83% 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 29 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 19 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. Flatiron is 3.8× more Mediterranean 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 64; the median $$$$ place scores 72. Four dollar signs buys you 8 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
$	28	64	474
$$	73	52	1,084
$$$	17	60	557
$$$$	24	72	1,288

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 155. 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	28	56	53,712
Coffee	25	37	18,156
Italian	19	32	35,893
American	14	58	28,343
Dessert	12	52	14,273
Bakery	11	42	10,578
Breakfast & Brunch	10	52	15,068
Japanese	9	54	8,754
Mediterranean	9	84	18,748
Mexican	7	68	14,233
Korean	6	80	10,749
Deli	5	46	2,815
Sushi	5	54	4,743
Chinese	5	82	7,862
Pizza	5	65	4,978
French	4	74	3,843
Asian	4	38	7,342
Latin	4	78	5,519

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 →