Is New York's Tap Water Really Better Than Everyone Else's?

New York City's tap water is so revered, so mythologized, that it is often said to be the secret ingredient in our other digestible sources of civic pride: pizza and bagels. Ink and pixel reserves have long been depleted in service of proving its culinary magic. NYC tap has even been famously dubbed "the Champagne of drinking water," by the city's irresistibly quotable NYC Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner, Rohit T. Aggarwala. And it is distinctive. But so are plenty of other areas' local potables. NYC's water infrastructure, however, is objectively better than plenty of other regions.

All the H2O that eventually pours from faucets all around the five boroughs comes from reservoirs in relatively nearby Westchester County, and particularly high-quality sources in the Catskills, and farther afield in Delaware. That water is tunneled to NYC to undergo treatment like chlorination. There, it is also monitored for safety and quality at a high daily cadence each year. According to the city's most recent drinking water supply and quality report, Department of Environmental protection scientists analyzed water samples 651,600 times in 2024 alone. And that's a drop in the bucket among further details in the twenty-page report. It also compares New York City's tap water quality metrics to state and federal standards to determine that Gotham's is top-notch. It's all just part of the elaborate tapestry that makes some municipal water taste better than others.

If you're from New York City, or even if you've just lived here for a long time, tap water tastes like regular water. It becomes an accepted standard. Once you're used to it, other places' tap will probably seem a little odd, even if it also just tastes like plain, good water to the locals. But NYC's water does actually have what seems to be a more pointed appeal.

New York City tap water tastes a lot like the most common bottled water varieties at the bodega. Regardless of whether or not some bottled water is really just repackaged tap, what's inside that package must be good enough for people to keep buying the stuff. NYC tap is crisp and, when served very cold, clean without tasting like chemicals. It can taste virtually indistinguishable from the most basic bottled water labels. It doesn't quite compete with higher ranked bottled water brands, which are zhuzhed up in their own ways, but it's comparable to the cheaper kinds. Nobody's making pizza or bagels with Fiji water, anyway.