CityInspection reports are public records
In the United States, restaurant health inspection reports are public records. Every city and county health department keeps them, and you are legally entitled to see them. The challenge has never been access rights — it is that the records are scattered across hundreds of local systems, many of them hard to search.
There is no single federal database. The FDA writes the model Food Code, but inspections are run locally, so the record for any given restaurant lives with its city or county health department.
Option 1 — The city or county health department website
Most large health departments run an online lookup on their own website. The NYC Department of Health, the LA County Department of Public Health and the Chicago Department of Public Health all have public search tools. These are authoritative, but they only cover their own jurisdiction and their interfaces vary wildly in quality.
Option 2 — Open-data portals
Many cities also publish their full inspection dataset on open-data portals such as Socrata or ArcGIS. These contain the raw records — every inspection, score and violation — and are the sources CityGrade syncs from. They are comprehensive but built for analysts, not diners: expect filterable spreadsheets rather than a search box.
Option 3 — CityGrade's multi-city search
CityGrade republishes official inspection records from verified city sources in one consistent format. Search any establishment by name or street in a supported city to see its current grade, score, inspection dates and full violation history. Each city page links back to the official portal so you can verify the authoritative record.
This is usually the fastest route when you want the answer in seconds, or when you are comparing establishments across different cities.
Option 4 — A public-records request
If none of the online sources cover your city, you can request inspection records directly from the local health department under your state's public-records law. This is slower — days to weeks — but it works everywhere and costs little or nothing for an individual request.
What to look for in a report
Do not stop at the grade or score. Check the inspection date (recent matters more), the inspection type (routine vs. complaint-driven), the specific violations, and the trend across multiple visits. One bad inspection followed by a quick, clean re-inspection tells a different story than repeated critical violations — and the full history is the only place you will see it.