Field report · New York, NY
Looking for New York’s lowest-rated restaurants? Start a live hunt around Manhattan, or explore our June 2026 sample below. It contained 11 listings under 3★; it does not identify every low-rated restaurant in the five boroughs.
Hunt the worst in New York →Free. No app. Google search results are a sample; default filters hide chains and places with fewer than ten reviews.
141 NYC restaurants from our June 2026 sweep, against the 18-city comparison pool.
New York is of our sample and of its disasters. Congratulations.
Aggregates from public Google ratings · full methodology. Ratings via Google Maps (Places API).
New York contributed more sub-3★ listings than any other city center in our collection. When we pulled the Google rating of 1,850 restaurants across 18 US city centers in June 2026, New York held 11 of the sample’s 28 listings rated under three stars, more than any other city we measured. The NYC median sits at 4.3★, under the pooled 4.4★, and 41 of the 141 Manhattan-area restaurants we sampled rate at or below 4.0★.
The results show a lower-rated tail in this returned sample. They do not establish whether density, foot traffic, or local reviewing habits caused it. The full 18-city comparison is in the inflation files.
Caveat, honestly: Google returns at most 20 results per search and Manhattan-grade density blows past that cap, so we undersample the city. Manual Maps searches may find places we missed. The figures below are a June 2026 snapshot, while the hunt uses current lookups that may be cached for up to 30 days.
Five-star hunting is for cowards.
Or read the Denver report, where a 4.0★ still means something.