✦ Midwood, counted
Midwood by the numbers.
Every restaurant we track in Midwood, Brooklyn — 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
69% 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 22 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 19 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. Midwood is 4.9× more Middle Eastern 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 66; the median $$$$ place scores 86. Four dollar signs buys you 20 points — on a scale where the gap between #1 and #50 in a single town is bigger than that.
| Price | Places | Median Sweet Score | Median ratings |
|---|---|---|---|
| $ | 34 | 66 | 150 |
| $$ | 54 | 64 | 267 |
| $$$ | 1 | 81 | 1,054 |
| $$$$ | 6 | 86 | 395 |
The categories
What this region is made of
Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 134. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dessert | 20 | 52 | 4,632 |
| Deli | 20 | 66 | 4,315 |
| Bakery | 19 | 66 | 4,348 |
| Coffee | 14 | 28 | 4,102 |
| Pizza | 11 | 40 | 7,679 |
| Chinese | 8 | 60 | 2,374 |
| Middle Eastern | 8 | 53 | 5,837 |
| Fast Food | 7 | 76 | 1,533 |
| Mexican | 7 | 64 | 1,992 |
| Breakfast & Brunch | 6 | 48 | 1,662 |
| Steakhouse | 6 | 63 | 7,082 |
| Burgers | 5 | 71 | 1,917 |
| Japanese | 5 | 58 | 1,328 |
| Italian | 4 | 45 | 429 |
| Mediterranean | 4 | 50 | 3,638 |
| Bagels | 4 | 56 | 1,056 |
| Sushi | 4 | 73 | 1,146 |
| Halal | 3 | 36 | 3,433 |
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.
- NY SMASHMidwood · 91 ratings86
- VanillaMe Homemade DesertsMidwood · 46 ratings82
- West Wing RestaurantMidwood · 83 ratings81
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.
- Di Fara PizzaMidwood · 4,713 ratings32
- Affy's Premium GrillMidwood · 1,899 ratings36
- Bordeaux SteakhouseMidwood · 1,744 ratings88
- Olympia SteakhouseMidwood · 1,711 ratings53
- Essen NY DeliMidwood · 1,499 ratings79
- Falafel TanamiMidwood · 1,327 ratings94
- Viva La DoughMidwood · 1,198 ratings96
- La SovaMidwood · 1,127 ratings96
- Joseph's Dream Burger (JDB)Midwood · 1,117 ratings58
- Pizza TimeMidwood · 1,061 ratings84
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.
- 13Outdoor seating
- 116Deliver
- 129Do takeout
- 32Take reservations
- 31Vegetarian options
- 91Good for kids
- 42Work for groups
- 4Allow dogs