About
A tool for one question: would I actually eat there?
How this started
I had developed a bit of a reputation as the "friend-group health inspector". Someone would suggest a restaurant, I would look up the health score or the reviews, and I would explain why I would rather not go. After a while people started asking me, "ok then, Mr. Health Inspector, where would you go instead?!"
It was a fair question, and I didn't have a good answer ready. So I started trying to quantify how I actually picked a place. That turned out to mean checking several things in several different places: the letter grade, the recent inspections, the reviews, how it compared to other restaurants nearby. Which is a lot of scrolling to do while sitting hungry on a weeknight, agonizing over which place would not gross me out.
NYC Clean Eats is that process in one page, with a score you can read at a glance. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and it works the same for everyone.
While I was building it, I found a lot of genuinely interesting things about how the inspection cycle works and about food safety in general. Nearly all of it is public and almost none of it is easy to get at, so we write some of it up under Insights. Making it easier to reach seems like it can only help people decide where to spend their time and money.
Where the data comes from
- Inspection records: the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, via NYC Open Data. Public record, updated daily.
- Older inspections: archived copies of that same dataset, for the years the city no longer serves. How that works.
- Star ratings: Google, and only if you allow third-party content. Read at the moment you ask and never stored.
What it does with your information
Close to nothing.
- No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for.
- Eating preferences stay on your device. If you tick options in the preferences drawer, they are written to your browser's own storage and never sent to our server. They change what we point out, never a score, and they never impact which restaurants you see.
- Third-party content is off until you say otherwise. If you decline, the health verdict is identical and only the star rating is withheld.
- The options are deliberately vague. Nine named allergens were collapsed into one "food allergy" tick once we measured that they all produced the same result. Asking which one would have meant collecting sensitive information we could not act on.
What it will not do
- Tell you the food is good. This measures hygiene records. A superb kitchen can have mice just as a dull one can be immaculate.
- Claim to be the city's view. The data is theirs. The judgment is ours, and they might weigh it differently. Here is exactly how we weigh it.
- Know what the kitchen looks like tonight. An inspection is a snapshot of one day, and no dataset fixes that.
Corrections
If a restaurant's record here looks wrong, it is worth checking against the city's own lookup. We read the same source, so a genuine discrepancy is a bug in our reading and we want to know about it. A grade that is wrong or missing in the window is a matter for the city, and the restaurant detail page links you straight to the right place to report it.