The Artisanal Tax
An interactive map of how menu prices for the same dish vary across New York City.
Canonical URL: https://sizzle-index.fly.dev/ Creator: Ansh Sancheti Status: Public interactive data project
What it is
The Artisanal Tax was built from 5,615,271 public menu rows. It maps prices for 500 dishes across 219 New York City Neighborhood Tabulation Areas.
For a selected dish, prices are grouped by neighborhood and deduplicated by restaurant name. A neighborhood needs observations from at least two restaurant names to appear. Each neighborhood is compared with the median neighborhood price for that dish: greener areas are cheaper and redder areas are more expensive.
The fixed color scale runs from 40 percent below to 40 percent above the median so colors remain comparable when the selected dish changes. Values beyond those bounds are clamped. The project describes the geography of available public menu-price data; it is not a census of every restaurant or a claim about menu quality.
What visitors can do
- Search 500 dishes and compare their typical prices across New York City.
- Inspect neighborhood prices, premiums or discounts, and observation counts.
- Browse the highest- and lowest-priced neighborhoods for a dish.
- Share URLs that preserve the selected dish and neighborhood.