✦ Southside, counted

Southside by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Southside, 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.

Median Sweet Scoreacross 185 scored places

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 4.4 — that badge is worn by 23 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 20 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. Southside is 2.3× more Juice Bars 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 61; the median $$$$ place scores 76. Four dollar signs buys you 15 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
$	86	61	156
$$	73	59	321
$$$	4	58	701
$$$$	9	76	491

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 203. 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	34	60	10,883
Deli	27	60	3,392
Coffee	21	78	6,670
Bakery	18	72	6,409
Pizza	17	63	7,632
Mexican	14	42	6,508
American	12	70	7,494
Dessert	12	76	4,101
Italian	12	55	7,711
Chinese	11	44	5,019
Fast Food	11	30	3,477
Latin	11	65	6,084
Japanese	9	61	2,191
Halal	7	70	1,241
Breakfast & Brunch	7	46	6,703
Juice Bars	7	61	512
Burgers	6	62	4,075
Seafood	6	80	2,039

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 →