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How many restaurants are there in New York City?

About 22,000. Say NYC households spend about $100 a week eating out, or $300 million in all, and visitors push it to $440 million. A typical 40-seat restaurant takes about $20,000 a week, so that's 22,000. A block-by-block count gives about 20,000.

Updated

How a 90-point answer starts

I'll define a restaurant as any place that mainly sells prepared meals. That covers sit-down places, pizza counters and fast food, but not bars, coffee shops or food carts.

See the full answer, the 50 and 70 versions, and what moves each score up.

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The numbers, step by step

Weekly restaurant spending by about 3 million households, plus a million commuters and tourists a day at about $20 each (lunch for most, every meal for a few), divided by the weekly sales of a typical 40-seat restaurant.

Household spend per week$60 dinner + 2 × $20 takeout
$100
Residents' spend per week3 million households × $100
$300 million
Visitors' spend per week1 million × $20 × 7 days
$140 million
Total spend per week$300 million + $140 million
$440 million
One restaurant's sales per week150 customers, takeout included, × $20 × 7
$21,000
Restaurants$440 million ÷ $20,000 (rounded down)
22,000
Check: count by neighborhood(8 million ÷ 20,000) × 25 blocks × 2
20,000
Check: one restaurant's sales per year$20,000 × 52 weeks
$1.04 million
Restaurants at $130 a household(3 million × $130 + $140 million) ÷ $20,000
26,500

What the interviewer listens for

  • Do you define what counts as a restaurant?
  • Do you pick one clear method and say it before the numbers?
  • Do you remember that commuters and tourists eat here too?
  • Is the typical restaurant's revenue built from seats, customers and spend?
  • Do you check the answer from a second direction?

Common mistakes

  • Counting only the 8 million residents.Tourists buy nearly every meal out and commuters buy lunch, so leaving them out cuts the answer by about a third.
  • Sizing from a busy Midtown dining room.Most places are small counters and neighborhood spots, and too large an average shrinks the count.
  • Leaving the definition open.Say whether coffee shops, bars, delis and food carts are in, or the interviewer can't tell what the final number counts.
  • Weekly spending divided by daily sales gives a number seven times too big, so match the time periods before dividing.

Likely follow-ups

  • Say only 600,000 visitors eat out on a typical day. What happens to the count?It drops to about 19,000. Visitor spending falls to $84 million a week and the total to $384 million.
  • Isn't $20,000 a week low for Manhattan?A little, but most of the count sits in the other boroughs, where small places dominate. At $30,000 a week the answer would fall to about 15,000.
  • The interviewer wants coffee shops in the count. What do you do?Add them as their own line, sized from spending, because a coffee shop takes in far less a week than a restaurant and would drag the average down.
“Doing the maths quietly was fine. Doing it while talking was slow. Practicing both together on Soreno helped me get through calculations with fewer pauses.”
Jordan W.Bain offer

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