New York, eaten borough by borough

What it is

A single-page guide to eating well in New York without spending a fortune. Every entry is a real place with an address, a short honest description, a price tier, and a line telling you what to order when you get there.

The rule is in the subtitle: delicious first, affordable by default, splurges flagged. Most of the list sits at the cheaper end. Anything at $$$ is marked as a splurge, so nobody walks into one by accident.

Who it is for

New Yorkers who want somewhere new, and visitors who want to eat where people from here eat. It is organised the way the city actually works: by area, from Downtown, Midtown and Harlem through the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Pick a neighbourhood, filter to eats, markets or carts, choose a price, or just search.

What I built, and how

1. One page, no app. Everything loads at once and filters instantly. It works on a phone on a street corner, which is where it gets used.
2. Every entry checked. Each place was confirmed as operating when it was added, with the date it was added and the date it was last verified shown on the entry.
3. An editor, not a scraper. The descriptions are written to be useful, then reviewed by a sceptical second pass. "What to order" is the line people actually want, so every entry has one.
4. Honest about its limits. The page says so at the bottom: this is New York, places close, carts move and hours lie. Look before you trek.
5. Light and dark modes. Readable in daylight or at the end of a long night.
6. Same estate as everything else. It runs behind the same edge as every other site here, monitored and backed up the same way.

What it shows I can do

A food guide looks like a hobby. Underneath it is a data problem, and a common one: a list of records that goes stale the moment you stop checking it.

• Designing a dataset with the fields that matter to the reader, and nothing else.
• Putting a verification date on every record, so anyone can see how fresh it is.
• Building a fast, filterable interface that works on the smallest screen.
• Writing for a real audience in a consistent voice across nearly two hundred entries.

For a client, the same pattern fits a supplier directory, a list of sites and contacts, an asset register or a service catalogue. Anything where the question is "is this still true?" benefits from a date on every line.

Questions people ask