[bradleyjg]

Eight restaurants reviewed in Queens in twenty years. If Queens were its own city, it'd be the fourth largest in the nation -- just ahead of Houston and not far behind Chicago.

Maybe they should rename it The Manhattanite, or maybe The Manhattanite, Preferably Below 14th Street.

[matthewowen]

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.

[CPLX]

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.

[reedk]

I used the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert street addresses into lat/lng. It seems to handle the idiosyncrasies of Queens addresses well. That said, if you see something that looks out of place, please let me know and I'll correct the data.