✦ Jamaica, counted

Jamaica by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Jamaica, Queens — 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 473 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

50% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4 — that badge is worn by 51 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. Jamaica is 4.1× more Indian 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 41; the median $$$$ place scores 36. Four dollar signs buys you -5 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
$	256	41	156
$$	170	38	169
$$$	1	60	54
$$$$	5	36	90

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 584. 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	102	50	8,812
Coffee	54	30	30,468
Chinese	53	28	13,657
American	51	38	25,071
Halal	50	48	21,986
Fast Food	42	37	31,515
Dessert	42	28	13,273
Pizza	39	38	12,490
Caribbean	37	59	18,447
Indian	37	33	17,726
Bakery	28	26	5,998
Mexican	27	40	7,851
Bar & Grill	26	32	3,420
Burgers	26	38	27,907
Latin	23	36	9,649
Asian	18	24	7,714
Breakfast & Brunch	17	34	10,113
Seafood	15	32	8,191

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 →