✦ Upper West Side, counted

Upper West Side by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Upper West Side, 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 258 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

77% 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 40 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. Upper West Side is 3.4× more Mediterranean 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 44; the median $$$$ place scores 90. Four dollar signs buys you 46 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	44	279
$$	134	52	671
$$$	14	78	504
$$$$	4	90	346

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 273. 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	52	51	27,502
Bakery	29	49	30,712
Bar & Grill	27	58	16,120
Dessert	24	50	15,021
Italian	22	52	33,623
American	21	58	26,789
Pizza	19	43	17,160
Mexican	15	47	15,033
Breakfast & Brunch	15	38	7,567
Deli	14	41	5,364
Chinese	14	50	6,900
Mediterranean	14	38	11,829
Japanese	12	58	6,404
Middle Eastern	11	41	9,433
Burgers	11	39	24,856
Latin	9	53	7,581
French	9	76	13,087
Asian	8	48	6,597

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 →