✦ Hell's Kitchen, counted

Hell's Kitchen by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Hell's Kitchen, 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 338 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 4.6 — that badge is worn by 60 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. Hell's Kitchen is 3.6× more Thai 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 62; the median $$$$ place scores 66. 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
$	102	62	282
$$	184	68	960
$$$	16	79	1,252
$$$$	14	66	474

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 350. 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	78	67	76,050
Coffee	52	72	41,101
Deli	30	53	7,645
Pizza	25	68	25,782
Breakfast & Brunch	24	56	32,508
Bakery	24	68	33,868
Italian	22	74	33,072
American	19	66	26,431
Mexican	19	66	26,899
Dessert	19	65	13,808
Japanese	18	71	19,070
Chinese	15	59	16,356
Latin	14	74	29,415
Thai	13	71	46,110
Burgers	13	71	56,294
Fast Food	12	58	11,052
Mediterranean	12	49	15,940
Asian	12	67	40,866

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 →