✦ Washington Heights, counted

Washington Heights by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Washington Heights, 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 290 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

63% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.3 — that badge is worn by 47 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. Washington Heights is 2.8× more Latin 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 34; the median $$$$ place scores 50. Four dollar signs buys you 16 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
$	163	34	135
$$	91	42	247
$$$	3	69	1,329
$$$$	2	50	310

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 348. 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
Deli	50	44	4,400
Coffee	40	33	15,642
Latin	32	30	25,827
Mexican	30	30	10,600
Pizza	30	36	6,865
Bakery	25	38	7,460
Fast Food	24	34	13,913
Bar & Grill	20	38	7,816
American	18	26	7,418
Dessert	17	17	2,649
Chinese	15	24	2,471
Juice Bars	13	75	1,965
Seafood	13	18	15,405
Burgers	12	35	12,798
Breakfast & Brunch	9	25	7,666
Italian	8	50	2,469
Asian	5	61	3,533
Steakhouse	4	18	2,546

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 →