✦ Flatlands, counted
Flatlands by the numbers.
Every restaurant we track in Flatlands, 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
65% 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 13 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 18 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. Flatlands is 3.2× more Caribbean 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 49; the median $$$$ place scores 24. Four dollar signs buys you -25 points — on a scale where the gap between #1 and #50 in a single town is bigger than that.
| Price | Places | Median Sweet Score | Median ratings |
|---|---|---|---|
| $ | 38 | 49 | 113 |
| $$ | 43 | 45 | 251 |
| $$$ | 2 | 44 | 2,142 |
| $$$$ | 1 | 24 | 408 |
The categories
What this region is made of
Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 107. 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 | 17 | 56 | 1,703 |
| Chinese | 12 | 47 | 1,416 |
| Coffee | 10 | 60 | 4,545 |
| Bakery | 10 | 73 | 2,063 |
| American | 8 | 28 | 2,489 |
| Dessert | 8 | 51 | 2,352 |
| Fast Food | 7 | 26 | 3,610 |
| Asian | 6 | 35 | 1,810 |
| Seafood | 6 | 13 | 7,693 |
| Caribbean | 6 | 43 | 3,576 |
| Pizza | 6 | 47 | 1,361 |
| Mexican | 5 | 46 | 1,526 |
| Breakfast & Brunch | 5 | 21 | 4,885 |
| Japanese | 3 | 31 | 1,039 |
| Bagels | 3 | 45 | 173 |
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.
- Nick's Lobster HouseFlatlands · 3,842 ratings57
- Floridian Plaza DinerFlatlands · 2,074 ratings14
- McDonald'sFlatlands · 1,710 ratings26
- Bed Stuy Fish FryFlatlands · 1,546 ratings7
- K 1 CrabFlatlands · 1,509 ratings8
- Starbucks Coffee CompanyFlatlands · 1,278 ratings21
- CZEN RestaurantFlatlands · 1,189 ratings64
- Boston MarketFlatlands · 1,104 ratings28
- Mill Basin DeliFlatlands · 740 ratings52
- Burger KingFlatlands · 723 ratings27
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.
- 13Outdoor seating
- 85Deliver
- 103Do takeout
- 23Take reservations
- 25Vegetarian options
- 61Good for kids
- 33Work for groups
- 1Allow dogs