✦ Kips Bay, counted
Kips Bay by the numbers.
Every restaurant we track in Kips Bay, 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.
The reason this site exists
Star averages can't tell anyone apart
74% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.4 — that badge is worn by 22 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 20 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. Kips Bay is 5.6× more Vietnamese 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 55; the median $$$$ place scores 88. Four dollar signs buys you 33 points — on a scale where the gap between #1 and #50 in a single town is bigger than that.
| Price | Places | Median Sweet Score | Median ratings |
|---|---|---|---|
| $ | 44 | 55 | 203 |
| $$ | 60 | 56 | 414 |
| $$$ | 3 | 79 | 312 |
| $$$$ | 2 | 88 | 3,712 |
The categories
What this region is made of
Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 121. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coffee | 27 | 60 | 13,811 |
| Bar & Grill | 16 | 54 | 9,625 |
| Pizza | 11 | 52 | 7,746 |
| Breakfast & Brunch | 11 | 41 | 9,664 |
| Japanese | 10 | 53 | 2,811 |
| Deli | 10 | 55 | 3,975 |
| Italian | 8 | 52 | 7,594 |
| Asian | 8 | 68 | 5,040 |
| Mediterranean | 7 | 75 | 10,865 |
| Dessert | 7 | 58 | 3,535 |
| Korean | 6 | 38 | 2,378 |
| Mexican | 6 | 63 | 1,868 |
| American | 6 | 70 | 2,170 |
| Bakery | 6 | 31 | 2,936 |
| Fast Food | 5 | 26 | 1,788 |
| Sushi | 4 | 50 | 1,063 |
| Burgers | 4 | 48 | 6,069 |
| Latin | 4 | 67 | 2,282 |
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.
- Mr B barKips Bay · 91 ratings90
- Forefeathers Chicken MadnessKips Bay · 216 ratings86
- Marko's PizzeriaKips Bay · 152 ratings82
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.
- Mira Mediterranean & Hookah LoungeKips Bay · 6,895 ratings96
- VatanKips Bay · 2,904 ratings68
- Hole In The Wall - Murray HillKips Bay · 2,655 ratings93
- Jackson Hole BurgersKips Bay · 2,416 ratings51
- Murray Hill DinerKips Bay · 2,343 ratings67
- 2nd Ave DeliKips Bay · 2,266 ratings70
- Vezzo NYC Thin Crust PizzaKips Bay · 1,906 ratings68
- Çka Ka QëllueKips Bay · 1,870 ratings83
- Gold coffeeKips Bay · 1,817 ratings95
- Mughlai Indian CuisineKips Bay · 1,808 ratings93
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.
- 41Outdoor seating
- 97Deliver
- 110Do takeout
- 48Take reservations
- 51Vegetarian options
- 65Good for kids
- 49Work for groups
- 13Allow dogs