CityWhy inspection scores matter
Every restaurant, café, food truck and school cafeteria in the United States is inspected by a local city or county health department. Inspectors check food storage temperatures, employee hygiene, cross-contamination risks, pest control and dozens of other factors that directly affect whether the food you eat is safe.
These records are public — but they are usually buried in government open-data portals that are hard to search and harder to read. That is the gap CityGrade fills: we republish the same official records in a format you can scan in seconds.
Step 1 — Pick your city
Health inspections are run locally, not nationally. There is no single federal database of restaurant inspections, so the first step is choosing the city where the establishment operates. On CityGrade, live cities appear on the homepage with a search box for each.
If your city is marked “coming soon”, it means we have not yet confirmed a machine-readable official source for it — each city publishes data on a different platform, and we verify every source individually before adding it.
Step 2 — Search by name or street
Type the restaurant's name into the search box. You can also search by street name if you are not sure of the exact name — useful for checking every food establishment on a block you are visiting.
Results show each establishment's current letter grade (A–F), its numeric score where the city publishes one, the date of its most recent inspection, and its establishment type (restaurant, grocery, school cafeteria, mobile unit and so on).
Step 3 — Read the full inspection history
Open the establishment's detail page to see its complete inspection history: every inspection date, the score or result, and the specific violations inspectors recorded. A single bad inspection years ago matters less than the trend — look at whether scores are improving, stable or declining.
CityGrade also explains each grade in plain English: what score band produced it, whether the letter came from the city or was derived from the numeric score, and what the most recent violations were.
What the grades mean
Cities score inspections differently — some publish letter grades, some publish numeric scores out of 100, and some only publish pass/fail results. CityGrade normalizes everything to one A–F scale so you can compare across cities: A means an excellent inspection, B means good with minor issues, C means significant violations were found, and F means serious or critical violations.
Where a city publishes only a score, the letter shown is derived (A 90–100, B 80–89, C 70–79, F below 70) and clearly labeled as such.
A note on accuracy
Inspection data is synced from official city portals on a regular schedule, but records can lag real-world conditions. For the authoritative record, always check the city open-data source linked from each CityGrade city page.