✦ Lower East Side, counted

Lower East Side by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Lower East Side, 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 187 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

79% 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 31 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. Lower East Side is 3.8× more Vegetarian 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 52; the median $$$$ place scores 50. Four dollar signs buys you -2 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
$	57	52	457
$$	90	64	566
$$$	11	56	683
$$$$	10	50	514

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 191. 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	56	57	43,358
Coffee	22	63	17,390
Japanese	15	68	19,313
Pizza	14	44	8,317
Deli	14	39	64,874
American	12	58	17,153
Bakery	12	74	13,895
Dessert	10	69	8,958
Chinese	9	50	7,371
Asian	6	58	6,051
Sushi	6	77	3,843
Seafood	6	38	6,986
Italian	6	54	4,228
Breakfast & Brunch	5	20	7,205
Caribbean	5	50	4,242
Burgers	5	59	11,583
Vegetarian	4	72	3,641
Latin	4	42	5,080

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 →