Show HN: An interactive map of restaurants reviewed by the New Yorker

Hi Michael- So glad that you like it! I'd love to hear more about what your team is working on. (I suppose it's not a dieresis on/off switch.) I'll shoot you an email.

> reëngineer

Just want to say I appreciated this :)

Im an Engineer at the New Yorker!

I can vouch that our team is very awesome.

We allocate time for open source projects, provide a budget for conferences, have a relaxed working environment, and have a very diverse team.

If you are interested, please shoot us a message!

I wonder if that's accurate. One of the big differences between Queens vs the rest of NYC is in the way postal addresses are handled.

In Manhattan every single address ends with "New York NY" and in Brooklyn every address ends in "Brooklyn NY", but in Queens the addresses correspond to the individual "cities" or rather neighborhoods that comprise the borough. So instead of "Queens NY" addresses end with "Long Island City NY" or "Flushing NY" or "Jamaica NY" despite being in the city of NYC.

So maybe this side project, which presumably is based on scraping the data from the New Yorker site, doesn't have all the various areas of Queens coded into it.

Or maybe it does, I'm just speculating wildly without actually looking into the matter.

Cities don't work that way though. Different areas have different mixes of residential/retail/business/nightlife.

If you slice off the more residential areas, of course you'll wind up with a big population with a smaller level of cultural activity, because cultural activity is often concentrated away from residential areas: people commute from Queens to Manhattan, and then they stay there to eat/drink. That's an oversimplification that doesn't apply to everyone... but that's the broad pattern.

For reference, according to http://a816-restaurantinspection.nyc.gov/RestaurantInspectio... Manhattan has about twice as many eateries as Queens. But that doesn't tell the whole picture, because a greater proportion of those Queens eateries are likely to be neighbourhood places, diners, delis: places that the New Yorker is obviously not going to review.

So yeah, there's probably some bias... but destination restaurants are concentrated in Lower Manhattan. That's the way it is. You should expect New Yorker reviews to reflect that.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't, but only a correlation. The things that get you a bad review are the same things that stop you building up the sort of repeat custom a restaurant needs in order to stay in business.

Now, if you could show there was a causal relationship between a bad review and a restaurant closing, that'd be really interesting.

Thanks for the upvote! I really like the idea of combining reviews from different publications on one map, especially with a filter to specify which ones to make visible.

I'd be interested to find out details of how you did this. It is a really neat idea and I wished you had it for my city!

Thanks! I like to build things that would be useful to me and it delights me to hear that other people find them useful to.

Yup, just scraping. Then hitting Google Geocoding API for lat/lng and the Yelp API for reviews and open/closed status.

Sorry about that... Google wanted my money. Back up now.

No one goes to a restaurant because they need to eat. There are quicker, cheaper, easier options. A restaurant should be seen in the same light as a trip to a theatre, or to a gig. You don't go to a gig to listen to songs you could play on your home hifi, you go for the experience. The reason to go to a restaurant is because it's also an experience - the food is a part of it, but there's much more. There's the ambiance, the company, the style, the luxury, the cost.

That is what a restaurant reviewer should write about. A report on what someone ate, or what they saw, is not a review. There should be an emotional ride. That's what a review is.

If you want to read some of the best restaurant reviews ever written, search for Jay Rayner's work in the Observer. He is masterful at writing about restaurants (and food, and wine). They're a joy.

Good thought! Will add it to the list.

To be clear: The red pins are restaurants that have gone out of business and are closed permanently; not restaurants that aren't currently open, but will open later in the day for (e.g. for dinner).

The Yelp API provides data on whether a restaurant is still in business and is fairly accurate.

Filtering by price, date reviewed, and open/closed status are in the backlog! Would you have a preference for the price as described by The New Yorker or by Yelp? (Or by some other source?)