From an unscientific glance at the map, it seems that there are a high concentration of highly reviewed restaurants in North Beach, Downtown, and the Mission. The worst-reviewed restaurants are spread more evenly throughout the city, though there don’t appear to be any particularly bad places in the areas where the top ones are.

Let’s take a closer look at the top two geographical boxes.

Northern tip of Ocean Beach (4.5 average rating)

Kawika’s Ocean Beach Deli (4.5)

TJ’s Cafe (4.5)

A small sample size gives this area a boost.

North Beach / Fort Mason (4.35 average rating)

Codmother Fish and Chips (4.5)

Hollywood Cafe (4.5)

Tanguito (4.5)

Hot Spud (4.5)

Fior d’Italia (4.0)

along with Carmel Pizza Company (4.5), 3 Potato 4 (4.5), Albona Ristorante Istrano (4.5), Darren’s Cafe (4.0), In-N-Out Burger (4.0). If I had to pinpoint one small area with a high concentration of highly reviewed restaurants, it’d be this one.

And the losers of this entire analysis are:

Daly City / Ingleside Heights border (2.33)

Chef Ming (2.5)

Golden Wok (2.0)

China Hut (2.5)

This is a hub for truly terrible Chinese food.

Noriega Street, Outer Sunset (2.75)

Eggettes (3.5)

Domino’s Pizza (2.0)

There’s just not much here.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t tell us where the best restaurants are, merely where to find ones that have been rated the highest by Yelp reviewers. Correlation between rating and “goodness” is a question for another time.

Furthermore, a high Yelp rating in one area is not equivalent to a high Yelp rating in another. Maybe people who eat/review in North Beach are particularly optimistic about their food while the Chinese take-out patrons in Ingelside are particularly prone to complaining on the Internet. I’ve also noticed that Asian restaurants in SF tend to have lower ratings than non-Asian places (Service is generally worse? Asian eaters are grumpier?). Even in an area as small as SF, it’s difficult to say that any two Yelp ratings can be considered equally. But if you have faith in the power of the Yelp reviewers, I hope I’ve been able to help you narrow your search for the next great (or terrible) thing.

I used the beautiful maps generated at stamen to visualize San Francisco, the Yelp API for data, and D3 for visualization.