When looking for a place to dine in NYC, we typically judge a restaurant by its menu or ambiance–maybe even whether it’s a celeb hot spot or not–but this interactive map judges NYC restaurants based on how attractive their diners are. Because, ya know, sometimes the real appetizer is the crowd!
Dubbed LooksMapping, the interactive map allows users to toggle through hundreds of NYC restaurants to find which have the hottest diners. The digital heat map scale ranges from 1 to 10, with 1 being restaurants with the least hot diners, pinned on the map in a shade of blue, and 10 being the restaurants with the hottest diners, pinned on the map in a shade of red.
We can’t deny that the map does sound a bit…shall we say, shallow. But we also can’t be the only ones who have seen the endless TikToks of New Yorkers running off lists of places around the city to find “hot people”–clearly there’s a market for this! Regardless, it’s not just us pointing out the map’s superficiality–the website itself reads:
The model is certainly biased. It’s certainly flawed. But we judge places by the people who go there. We always have. And are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.
Riley Walz, a 22-year-old San Franciscan programmer, is the one behind LooksMapping. Over the course of one weekend, Walz enlisted an AI model to scrape approximately 2.8 million Google Maps reviews regarding 9,834 restaurants located in NYC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Each reviewer with a detectable face in their profile photo was then rated against a set of descriptive phrases to determine attractiveness, age, and gender-related attributes. The phrases included:
- “She is attractive and beautiful”
- “He is attractive and handsome”
- “She is unattractive and ugly”
- “He is unattractive and ugly”
- “A young person”
- “An old person”
Relative attractiveness scores were then calculated for each reviewer, though Walz told The New York Times “the way it scored attractiveness was ‘admittedly a bit janky,'” using arbitrary details to gauge a reviewer’s hotness. For example, someone wearing a wedding dress would be considered “hot” while someone with a blurry photo would be considered “not hot.”
Walz also added that the map is essentially “making fun of AI” and that the data is “not an accurate gauge of what the human customers in the dining room look like” as San Francisco’s top two “hot” spots are takeout joints.
Alas, according to the map, the top five NYC restaurants with the hottest diners are as follows:
1. Ubani Midtown, Midtown East – 10/10
2. Shinn WEST, Hell’s Kitchen – 10/10
3. KYU NYC, NoHo – 10/10
4. Aroy Dee Thai Kitchen, Financial District – 10/10
5. Thai 55 Carmine, West Village – 10/10
And, according to the map, the top five NYC restaurants with the, well, “not hottest” diners are as follows:
1. Jimbos Hamburger, Harlem – 1/10
2. Hop Won Express, Midtown East – 1/10
3. Cocotazo, East Harlem – 1/10
4. Malone’s Irish Bar & Restaurant, Midtown East – 1/10
5. Michael’s New York, Midtown East – 1/10
Intrigued diners can view the map for themselves online here. Do what you want with the information you find, but just keep in mind you’ll likely want to take it with a grain of salt.
Some of our other favorite interactive maps include the following:
- This Updated Interactive Map Shows The 2,500 NYC Streets & Intersections Named After Famous NYers
- This Interactive Map Helps You Explore All Of NYC’s Colorful Subway Art
- This Interactive NYC Neighborhood Map Defines Borders Once & For All
- This Interactive Map Helps You Find All Of NYC’s Cooling Centers
- Here’s Every Open Bathroom In NYC On One Convenient Map