The State of America's Restaurant Inspections, Mapped.
Four cities. Hundreds of thousands of public-health records. A first look at where eating out is cleanest — and where it isn't.
Every restaurant in Seattle, New York, Chicago and San Francisco is inspected on a public schedule. The results are filed in open data portals — and yet almost no diner ever reads them. Tap a dot on the map below to see exactly what an inspector found at any one of them.
Each city scores its inspections a little differently, so the map sorts every record into three buckets — low, medium and high risk — and then ranks neighbourhoods and ZIP codes by how clean their kitchens tend to be. The methodology is at the bottom.
A map of every recent restaurant inspection.
Figure 1Each dot is a single health inspection. Switch cities at the bottom right. Click a dot to read the violation. Open the filter panel for risk and grade breakdowns.
Which districts run the cleanest kitchens?
Every inspection is scored 100 for low risk, 50 for medium, 0 for high. Each district's score is the mean. Numbers refresh with whatever city and filters you've selected on the map above. Districts with fewer than 5 inspections in view are excluded.
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How to read this map
The four cities don't grade restaurants the same way. Seattle counts violation points, New York hands out letter grades, Chicago sorts kitchens by risk tier, San Francisco tallies violations per visit. We translate them into a single comparable scale.
Every inspection lands in one of three buckets. Low 100 means the kitchen passed cleanly. Medium 50 means an inspector flagged something. High 0 is a serious problem. Those numbers feed into the Quality Index above.
| City | What inspectors record | Low 100 | Medium 50 | High 0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Violation points | 0–4 points | 5–14 points | 15+ points |
| New York | Letter grade & points | Grade A (0–13) | Grade B (14–27) | Grade C or 28+ points |
| Chicago | Risk tier | Risk 3 | Risk 2 | Risk 1 (highest hazard) |
| San Francisco | Violations per visit | 0–2 violations | 3–9 violations | 10+ violations |
The Quality Index
Each district's index is the average of its inspections on that 0–100 scale: closer to 100 the cleaner, closer to 0 the worse. We use ZIP codes in Seattle and Chicago, NTA neighbourhoods in New York and official neighbourhoods in San Francisco. Anywhere fewer than five inspections fall inside the current filters is dropped from the ranking so a single bad visit can't tank a whole area.
The colour fill on the map is the same scale: greener districts have higher quality indexes, redder ones lower.
Sources & caveats
Data is drawn from four open portals: King County (Seattle), NYC DOHMH, City of Chicago and SFGov. Snapshots are stored locally in /data and refreshed manually; the underlying historical CSVs are downloaded directly from each city. Inspection records are imperfect — they reflect what an inspector saw on one day, not the steady state of a kitchen. Use this as a starting point, not a verdict.