Chicagoist's 'Statistically Accurate' List Of The Best Restaurants In Chicago
By Staff in Food on May 16, 2014 4:00PM
The world is full of "best restaurants" lists. Sometimes it can seem a little overwhelming. That's why we had data journalist Steven Melendez crunch a bunch of them together into one giant super-list.
The results are pretty interesting, jamming together Chicago's world-class fine dining restaurants like Alinea with our amazing encased meats scene at institutions like Hot Dougs and Publican Quality Meats. The reason is that Steven used Zagat's average price indicator to control for price point.
Here's how the results were generated:
Each restaurant gets one point for:- each Michelin star, if any
- any AAA diamonds above 3
- being listed on the Chicago Food Snob's Top 85
- being listed in Chicago Magazine's "A List"
- being listed in Eater's Essential 38 Chicago restaurants
- being listed in Food and Wine's top Chicago restaurants
- being listed in Complex's Top 10 Chicago restaurants
- being listed in the Chicago Reader's Best of 2013
- being listed in OpenTable's Top 10 Chicago restaurants
- being listed in The Guardian's Top 10 Chicago restaurants
- being listed in Thrillist's list of Chicago's best restaurants
- receiving a Chicago Tribune 2014 dining award
- being listed in Time Out Chicago's "Cheap Eats Challenge"
- Additionally, each Zagat-rated restaurant gets its Zagat food score / 15 (so a perfect-scoring restaurant would get a full two points).
We processed it all into one extremely cool map, shown below. Click on the dots to read more about each restaurant:
Steven Melendez is a Brooklyn-based independent journalist who was previously a full-time member of WNYC's Data News Team. If you are curious, check out the Best Restaurants lists for New York and San Francisco.