Who we are.
An editorial guide to New York written by people who actually live here.
The premise
New York is too big and too opinionated for a listicle. You don't need thirty-seven “best pizza in NYC” roundups that all agree because they all sourced each other. You need ten. You need a number short enough to remember and long enough to cover what actually matters.
Top 10 NYC started because every city guide either tried to do everything or said nothing. We eat at the places before we write about them. We walk the neighborhoods before we declare a winner. The rankings are ours: not aggregated, not algorithmic, not crowd-sourced. If you disagree, that's correct. This is New York.
The voice
We write the way a cabbie talks: direct, a little impatient, never wrong about the shortcut. There's no “vibrant culinary scene” here. No “hidden gem.” No “nestled.” If a place is great, we say it's great and tell you exactly why. If it used to be great, we say that too.
This city rewards specificity. The corner matters. The hour matters. Whether you're a tourist or a lifer, you deserve writing that assumes you can handle the truth, and maybe saves you from a bad night.
Made in New York
Top 10 NYC is independent. No venture capital, no parent company, no editorial board in a building in another city making calls about this one. The writers here grew up in New York or moved here and never left. They have opinions about the 4/5/6 and strong opinions about which borough has the best bodega sandwiches.
We cover all five boroughs, not just Manhattan — and we'll be honest that Manhattan runs deepest today while the outer-borough shelves grow list by list. We update lists when reality changes. We issue corrections without burying them. That's the whole deal.
Analytics
We watch how the site gets used, not who's using it. Everything is first-party: no cookies, sent straight from your browser to a database we run ourselves. Nobody else's server ever sees it.
If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we listen: we drop the persistent id, so there is nothing that recognizes you across days. Your visit is still counted like everyone's.
What we keep: a rough city-level location, the name of your network provider, a random id that lives in your browser, which pages you view and searches you type, which links you click and how far you scroll, and rough device details like browser and screen size. What we never keep: your IP address, your name, or anything close to a precise location.
No third parties in our analytics. No ad networks, no data brokers, nobody buying it off us. It stays here, and it exists for one reason: to tell us which lists people actually read.
One honest exception on the pages themselves: where we don't have a licensed photo of a place, we show the restaurant's own Instagram post through Instagram's embed player, which loads from Meta as you scroll to it. That's Meta serving the venue's photo — it is not us sending Meta anything about you, and none of our analytics ever leave this site.