Two things I like are data and food. The two rarely mix, unless you do something stupid like create a heatmap of restaurant density in New York City. Which is exactly what I did. Without further ado, here it is:

 

 

 

If you find this chart tasty, then try calling back for reservations over the next few days. The raw data set from NYC OpenData includes restaurant inspection grades and cuisine types, so consider this just the appetizer.

 

Lots of attributions here, since putting this together was like making Frankenstein. Restaurant addresses, of course, came from NYC OpenData's Restaurant Inspection Results. Geocoding the raw addresses turned out to be harder than I expected, but it was nothing Excel/VBA (don’t judge) and Yahoo! PlaceFinder couldn’t solve. In order to generate the heatmaps, I used the Google Maps API and, most crucially, a JS heatmap library from Patrick Wied. Phew.