✦ Midtown East, counted

Midtown East by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Midtown East, 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 211 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

83% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.5 — that badge is worn by 34 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. Midtown East is 3.7× more French 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 46; the median $$$$ place scores 52. Four dollar signs buys you 6 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
$	70	46	338
$$	92	54	486
$$$	11	33	688
$$$$	24	52	531

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 212. 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	45	44	19,326
Bar & Grill	26	53	53,718
Breakfast & Brunch	21	47	13,924
Dessert	19	36	7,162
Japanese	16	44	11,986
American	15	62	18,047
Bakery	15	45	8,357
Deli	14	44	4,222
Italian	12	54	9,198
Chinese	11	39	5,443
Burgers	11	36	16,273
Pizza	10	63	13,799
Fast Food	9	54	10,064
Steakhouse	9	63	16,701
Mexican	8	58	6,274
Seafood	8	54	13,940
French	8	48	8,887
Indian	7	46	4,266

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 →