Data Analysis on Restaurants in Downtown Brooklyn

June 13, 2019

During my time in downtown Brooklyn, one of the things that drove me mad was looking at restaurant reviews. Friends and I would decide to go to restaurants, and we’d look at the ratings. When we did, we’d get an aggregate rating of 3.5 or 4. But what does it all mean? It really doesn’t mean anything unless we understand the distribution of the data.

It drove me nuts. I had to find out the average, and what the review landscape look like.

So I did. I cobbled together a program in Python using Scrapy, Pandas, and Matplotlib. I would have left out Sir Scrapy, but the review website’s api had this random feature where if you queried a restaurant for all its reviews, it would give you 3. Grr…

Process:

I used the a certain restaurant review website’s own filters to hone in on downtown Brooklyn within a mile radius. The website’s api request gave me two two longitude latitude pairs. They are shown below:

Interesting. So it’s either endpoints of a circle, or a rectangle. I think it’s a rectangle, so we’re going to refer to this area as the rectangle.

This search query gave me a starting point of all restaurants, but displayed only 10 or 20. I scraped them, and then used a program to move to the next page. I stored the set of restaurants in a directory. Then for every restaurant, I automated a http request, got to the main webpage which was an anchor point of a restaurants set of reviews. So I went through all those reviews and got them too.

Results:

Number of restaurants in the bounding box: ~500.

Number of restaurant reviews: ~70,000.

The average of all review ratings: 3.70

Standard deviation of all ratings: 1.32

Graphs:

So people in Brooklyn tend to rate 4s and 5s much more often than 1s and 2s. I wonder if you do this for every city, then could you gauge a friendliness metric for every city, and see if it correlates with the happiness ranking of every country? That would be AMAZING.

This is if you plot average rating of restaurants, and plot them by rounding them to the nearest 0.5.

This is simply the number of reviews and their restaurant names. Seems like it follows some power law distribution, but I’m not quite sure. It may be just one outlier.

Top 20 restaurants by review count:

I guess this can be interpreted as popularity or to some degree how much people care. One can perhaps use this information to extrapolate the length of time the restaurants have been around.

Restaurant Number of Reviews
Grimaldi’s Pizzeria 4440
Juliana’s Pizza 1955
Junior’s Restaurant 1573
Joya 1259
Rocco’s Tacos & Tequila Bar 1196
The River Café 1038
Habana Outpost 962
Shake Shack 788
Mile End Delicatessen Brooklyn 744
Clover Club 728
Yaso Tangbao 703
Ki Sushi 671
Hanco’s 658
Vinegar Hill House 634
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Downtown Brooklyn 621
Forno Rosso 604
Two 8 Two Bar & Burger 603
Dekalb Market Hall 589
Bedouin Tent 586
Sottocasa Pizzeria 586

Top 50 Highest Restaurants by review average (ignore just 5s – probably insufficient number of reviews. Perhaps I will add review count next to the rating later…)

Restaurant Average Rating
Moshman Dental 5
Pipitone’s Pizza 5
Bird’s Eye Vietnamese 5
VALENTINE’S CAFE 5
First Wok 5
New Fresco Tortilla Plus 5
Smith Gourmet Deli 4.952380952
Thai on Wheels 4.888888889
Lillo Cucina Italiana 4.870588235
GMC Temaxcal Deli & Grocery 4.833333333
Simple NYC-Downtown Brooklyn 4.80952381
Yumpling Food Truck 4.790697674
Cafe Gitane 4.75
Sunny Delicatessen 4.75
Pret A Manger 4.666666667
Ashland 4.625
Govinda’s Vegetarian 4.621118012
Dariush Persian Cuisine 4.580645161
Grand Canyon Restaurant 4.577777778
dot & line 4.52173913
Rice & Miso 4.519230769
dumboLUV 4.5
Kazi Halal 4.5
Saint Julivert 4.5
Yemen Cafe & Restaurant 4.452173913
E-bite 4.444444444
Sanpanino 4.444444444
ACE Thai Kitchen 4.414634146
Sushi Gallery 4.4140625
Bread & Spread 4.412698413
Lavatera Grill 4.409090909
Forcella Fried Pizza 4.407407407
Chicks Isan 4.404761905
Doner Kebab NYC 4.401360544
Mr. Fulton 4.4
W XYZ Bar 4.4
Yossi’s Cart 4.4
Juliana’s Pizza 4.396930946
Shawarma & Grill 4.375
Makina Cafe 4.375
Koji Izakaya 4.358974359
Daigo Handroll Bar 4.333333333
Metro Buffet 4.333333333
Warung Roadside 4.333333333
Taiki 4.327586207
Sultan Restaurant & Cafe Lounge 4.3125
Espresso Me 4.306122449
Piz-zetta 4.305220884
Downtown Natural Market 4.304347826
Sottocasa Pizzeria 4.298634812

To-do list:

Examining all this data is a lot of fun! But for now, my experiments are on hiatus. There’s already enough things to read and build! But if anyone wants some Brooklyn data, let me know!

Tips:

  1. You should probably use this dataset to get interesting insights: https://www.yelp.com/dataset/download
  2. DO NOT SIMPLY SCRAPE ON YOUR LOCAL NETWORK. If you mess up, it’ll cause your ip to be banned. Your ISP will refresh your ip within a month, but it’ll annoy the people who share the internet connection with you. Either use a vpn, or spin up a cloud computing instance and use that to download your data.
  3. Rate limit your scraper. Don’t try to download all this data within a span of a minute. Pace your scraper to download a reasonable amount in a minute so you don’t overload their apis. Or get caught. There is no need to rush.
  4. You should learn regular expressions. I was talking to someone who was doing data collecting with DOM traversal. That maybe more painful than building a reasonable regular expression. My two cents.