Dining Democracy

Over the past two years, Frank Bruni, the New York Times' restaurant critic has mentioned the East Village in articles over 35 times, according to a Lexis-Nexis search, while at the other end of the spectrum, neighborhoods like Harlem (7 mentions), Chinatown (4), Washington Heights (1), and East Harlem (0) were written about much less frequently.

I got interested in finding out this information after digging deeper into the 45,000+ restaurant reviews I pulled from Menupages earlier this week (go here for earlier post on this), because it turns out that places like Harlem and East Harlem are actually better-rated, on average, than other Manhattan neighborhoods that are more famous for their cuisines like Tribeca, Soho, and the East Village.

Of course, caveats apply, which I'll get into later, but let me first go through how Harlem comes out on top.

Menupages is a web site that lists the menus and relative cost for thousands of restaurants in New York (and other big cities). The site's users also have the ability to rate and review each restaurant. For each restaurant in the neighborhoods I mention below, I obtained the star-rating, cost (measured from $ to $$$$$), and the number of reviews. The following chart shows the number of eateries in each neighborhood as listed in Menupages (in red) as well as the number of eateries in that neighborhood that have at least five reviews (in blue).

This distinction becomes important because neighborhoods with many unreviewed or little-reviewed restaurants get penalized -- unfairly, I'd argue -- for being relatively unpopular. But there are other factors besides food that can make an area less desirable to visit. So, to get a better sense of how well-covered each neighborhood is on Menupages, this next chart shows the percentage of restaurants in each neighborhood with at least five reviews:

In general, the hoods with the most restaurants are also the best covered by Menupages users. The exception is Morningside Heights which, thanks to its large student population, is the best-covered area, even while having relatively few restaurants. East Harlem and Harlem, respectively, are the worst-covered areas.

Now let's see what happens to the average star-rating for each neighborhood before and after adjusting for reviewed restaurants:

The most obvious point is that there isn't a huge difference between the average rating for different neighborhoods. (The average restaurant in Manhattan has a 3.7 rating, is 2.7 dollar signs expensive, and has been reviewed by 21 customers.)

But differences do exist, and the best area for a good dining experience seems to be totally unhip East Harlem with an average rating of 3.83 stars followed by it's more trendy Harlem neighbor to the west with 3.82 stars. The best restaurants in East Harlem, as per Menupages, include Joy Burger Bar, Polash, Piatto D'Oro II. In Harlem, it's Uptown Juice Bar, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and Amy Ruth's.

The "worst" place for food is also the best-covered, Morningside Heights, with a still-decent 3.5 rating. In fact, across all the neighborhoods I looked at, there was a relatively robust negative relationship between how well-reviewed a neighborhood was and its star rating.

What does this mean? The results for the two Harlems may be artificially high if only the best restaurants are the ones getting reviewed. It's no mystery that Harlem has been getting gentrified over the last decade, so maybe the rich kids -- the ones more likely to hop online and rate a restaurant -- are only frequenting the best eats.

On the other hand, you could argue food critics like Bruni aren't quite getting the job done as far as alerting readers to new and off-the-beaten-path dining choices in Manhattan. It's not like Bruni can't identify good restaurants (or that people don't follow his recommendations). This scatter plot shows that if Bruni mentioned an area at least 10 times, then there was a good correlation between his mentions and the area's star-rating on Menupages:

But when you throw in the areas Bruni doesn't write about, the correlation disappears.

I don't mean to pick on Bruni here, but I'm not a food expert and his name is the first one that came to my mind. Still, there are a couple of takeaways here: 1) this might be further proof that the news media is often the last to spot a trend 2) the less-traveled-to, and cheaper, parts of Manhattan may help foodies get through the rough times that are a'coming.

(Note: The results were pretty much the same when Midtown neighborhoods were included, but because I wasn't completely satisfied with the geographical borders for different Midtown hoods, I kept those areas out of the analysis above.)

(Note 2: And apologies to all of you who live outside of Manhattan and could care less.)

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