✦ Times Square, counted

Times Square by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Times Square, 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 506 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

80% 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 87 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. Times Square is 5× more Steakhouse 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 41; the median $$$$ place scores 56. 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
$	126	41	670
$$	240	47	1,097
$$$	46	58	654
$$$$	71	56	1,212

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 518. 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	117	36	122,910
Bar & Grill	70	54	103,744
Italian	48	56	108,903
American	43	51	124,374
Bakery	42	40	51,950
Dessert	42	47	84,983
Breakfast & Brunch	37	27	51,744
Seafood	32	45	119,664
Steakhouse	31	50	132,667
Deli	28	29	14,021
Pizza	27	57	84,287
Burgers	27	30	97,331
Japanese	23	46	45,210
French	21	60	44,272
Mexican	20	60	48,299
Fast Food	19	30	51,039
Chinese	17	59	23,392
Asian	15	64	24,446

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 →