✦ Manhattan Valley, counted

Manhattan Valley by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Manhattan Valley, 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 138 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

75% 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 24 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. Manhattan Valley is 4.5× 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.

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 53; the median $$$$ place scores 48. 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
$	56	53	172
$$	65	53	326
$$$	3	71	343
$$$$	2	48	739

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 151. 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	20	48	5,402
Deli	17	48	4,389
Chinese	16	55	11,760
Pizza	15	47	8,111
Bakery	13	58	6,622
Dessert	12	46	2,397
Bar & Grill	12	48	5,743
Italian	9	58	4,066
Japanese	9	71	3,773
Indian	8	49	3,246
Mexican	7	71	2,559
American	7	48	3,408
Halal	7	71	2,780
Breakfast & Brunch	6	48	3,874
Sushi	6	80	1,951
Asian	6	66	4,576
Mediterranean	6	58	2,713
Thai	4	30	730

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 →