✦ Harlem, counted

Harlem by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Harlem, 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 263 scored places

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 4.3 — that badge is worn by 40 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. Harlem is 11.1× more Soul Food 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 31; the median $$$$ place scores 23. 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
$	121	31	115
$$	124	40	328
$$$	6	39	406
$$$$	1	23	632

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 337. 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	60	34	8,332
Coffee	42	60	18,006
American	31	19	21,195
Bar & Grill	25	43	22,592
Chinese	23	16	3,551
Seafood	20	40	12,121
Dessert	17	12	3,799
Burgers	16	19	19,361
Caribbean	15	37	10,655
Fast Food	13	21	6,948
Halal	13	28	3,758
Bakery	13	46	4,651
Soul Food	12	48	36,070
Pizza	12	42	3,538
Mexican	11	38	5,101
Breakfast & Brunch	11	27	15,760
Juice Bars	10	54	405
Italian	9	51	6,089

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 →