We used Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor to rank Bellingham restaurants. There was a clear winner
Whether you put more stock into a restaurant’s rating or the number of reviews it has, whether you use Yelp or Google, everyone has their own system for interpreting online restaurant reviews. We decided to do our best to combine all these factors into one standardized set of rankings.
So if you’re looking for the highest-ranked restaurants in Bellingham with the best reviews, but don’t want to deal with the confusion of figuring it out alone, we have you covered. We came up with a method to combine Google, Yelp and TripAdvisor data, while weighing all of these factors, to come up with a (mostly) definitive ranking of the best-reviewed restaurants in Bellingham.
The Birch Door Cafe gets top spot
With a score of 15.32, Meridian St. brunch spot the Birch Door Cafe took first place in a landslide – no other restaurant topped 14.8. The cafe holds a rating above 4.5 stars on each of the three sites, most notably earning a score of 4.7 across over 2,300 reviews on Google.
The restaurant’s menu is highlighted by its souffle-style pancakes, along with breakfast staples such as omelets and eggs Benedict. It also offers a lunch menu with burgers, sandwiches and salads.
The rest of the top five
Downtown bar and taco spot Black Sheep took second place. Its hand-made tortillas and wide selection of tacos helped it consistently earn high marks across all three platforms – it holds a 4.5 from over 400 reviews on Yelp and a 4.6 on over 900 Google reviews.
Located just down the street from the Bellis Fair Mall, New Mexico Tamale Company was close behind in third. It had the highest Yelp rating of any restaurant in the city with over 100 reviews at a 4.7, and a perfect 5 on TripAdvisor. The only thing hurting its ranking was its relative lack of reviews – 682 across all three platforms.
Fairhaven breakfast and lunch spot Shirlee Bird Cafe took fourth place, highlighted by a 4.8 on Google, although its coffee selection definitely helped its cause. In fifth, Mi Rancho Meat Market, a butcher shop-turned-taqueria in northwestern Bellingham, received rave reviews on Google, with a 4.7 across over 1,200 ratings
The rest of the top ten
Lettered Streets-area beer and pizza spot Elizabeth Station narrowly missed the top five, as did Russian dumpling shop and late-night staple Pel’meni.
Downtown’s Fiamma Pizza came in eighth place, largely due to its sheer number of reviews – over 2,500 across all three sites. Peruvian sandwich spot Cafe Rumba had slightly higher ratings, but fell to ninth place with over 1,000 fewer reviews than its around-the-corner neighbor. Rounding out the top ten was D’Anna’s Cafe Italiano, with strong Google and TripAdvisor scores making up for a 4.2 on Yelp.
The rest of the top 20
AB Crepes
The Filling Station (Fairhaven location)
Our criteria
We only considered restaurants with over 100 reviews on Yelp so that we were only ranking established restaurants and that our sample size was big enough.
Many Bellingham eateries toe the line between coffee shop or bar and restaurant. For those, we only included options that have a full menu of food options.
One restaurant listed didn’t have a TripAdvisor page. In that case we averaged the Yelp and Google scores and used that number in place of a TripAdvisor score.
Our methodology
We started out by adding up the Yelp, Google and TripAdvisor scores of each restaurant. After that, we gave each restaurant a .05 boost for each online poll or ranking of the best restaurants in the area that they’ve been featured on in the last five years. Finally, we added .05 for each 100 reviews that a restaurant received up to its 1000th review. Since we figured Bellingham diners wouldn’t put as much stock into each additional review, we only added .025 boost for each 100 reviews after the thousandth.
