The Best and Worst Restaurants in Manhattan

Being a Manhattanite, Menupages has always fascinated me. The web site, purchased in July by New York Magazine, lists the actual menus for over 6,700 restaurants in Manhattan and thousands more for a bunch of other places. Since I'm a homebody and a bit lacking in the cooking department, I order a fair amount of delivery with the help of Menupages. (Though I don't think I'm as lazy as that all sounds.)

The site has a deep user-base with 91 percent of the Manhattan listings having at least one review and 70 percent containing five or more. The great ancillary benefit of this, as any data geek soon realizes, is that a good amount of publicly available information that's actually useful is available for analysis. Unfortunately, Menupages doesn't do much of this itself, so here's a first attempt from some data on Manhattan restaurants I pulled from the site during a quiet stretch this weekend.

In order to complete a review, a user has to give their impressions in words and then also rate the restaurant on four factors: food, service, value, and atmosphere -- all on a 0 to 5 scale. Menupages then (as best as I can tell) averages these four ratings across all reviews and gives the restaurant an overall star rating.

As you might expect, there are very few five-star restaurants. And the ones that have maintained that rating have logged very few reviews. For example, two five-star eats are tied with the most reviews received at five: gramstand, a tea house in the East Village, and Indian Road Cafe, a coffeehouse in Inwood.

But if we lower our sights a little, to say 4.5 stars, then there are a lot more credible establishments vying for the best rated-restaurant in Manhattan. Two places have received 49 reviews and maintained a 4.5 rating: Indigo Indian Bistro in Midtown East and Da Andrea, which serves Italian in the West Village. And with just one more review at 50, Il Mattone in Tribeca has also earned a 4.5 star rating. (This is all as of Sunday)

How accurate are these reviews? One way to test is to look on Yelp, a popular review site. On there, Il Mattone and Da Andrea both receive 3.5 stars out of 5, but on fewer reviews. Indigo Indian Bistro is not listed on Yelp.

As for the worst place to eat? Well, I feel bad knocking them by name, but I'll give you the link. I'll just note that this place received a two-star rating on 55 reviews. The next establishment with the same rating received 40 less.

Next time, I'll take a look at which neighborhood has the best overall ratings -- the answer will likely surprise you.

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