New Restaurant Inspection Site from the Department of Health

The Department of Health has relaunched its restaurant inspection look-up website, so it'll be easier for New Yorkers to know how clean or unclean restaurants they frequent are...or maybe confirm why there are some restaurants you avoid. Gothamist gave it a test run last night and we have to say it is must easier to navigate than the old site: Now you can search by category, borough, violations, name, zip code. There are quite a few restaurnts that have violations, but many seem to fail inspections because their permits might not be valid - not great, but not as bad as, say, a mouse found in the butter. You can have hours and hours of fun looking up restaurants yourself, but we looked up the establishment with the most violations - the bar, Time Out, on the Upper West Side. For perspective, a restaurant fails if they have 27 points; Time Out had 137 points. Some of the highlights:

- Evidence of flying insects or live flying insects present in facility food and/or non-food areas
- No facility available to wash, rinse, and sanitize untensils
- Food not protected from potential source of contamination during storage, preparation, transportation, display or service

According to the records, Time Out closed, but Gothamist thought we saw it open in the past few months, so we assume they tried to bring themselves up to code. The NY Times says about 4,000 restaurants fail each year, with only 500 closing (there are 24,000 restaurants in city overall, with 100 inspectors).

A previous post about restaurant inspections with some great comments. The NYC Department of Health's Restaurant Inspection Information site.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By Jen Chung in News on January 19, 2006 10:18 AM

Comments [rss]

Andrew J. Lederer

"The website is great, but I prefer L.A.'s system of posting letter grades at each restaurant. I doubt I'm going to take the time to look up each establishment before I eat there."

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Yeah. That's what I was going to say. They do it that way in San Diego too. Logically, that should be done in every large city. I can't see who, except for restaurant owners, would object to it. (It's like a paper trail for electronic voting machines. Who would be against it except someone who wanted to maintain the option to cheat.)

timThompson

That's what you call the low-cost bidder, noonespecial. It's the guy that doesn't know how much the project is really going to cost.

noonespecial

The old and new inspection report site is hosted at a commercial outfit, much like Gothamist is. So you can blame M&H Enterprises of Houston, Texas.

Pretty dumb that with all the NYC or NYS Internet companies, the city has to go to Texas, and to a company who didn't seem to realize that they'd better have some beefy gear to run this thing.

mrclean

site is flooded so forget about checking your local haunts today given times piece and unreliable, overtaxed city servers...

Wendy

The website is great, but I prefer L.A.'s system of posting letter grades at each restaurant. I doubt I'm going to take the time to look up each establishment before I eat there.

That said, I did look up the Chinese place where I grab dinner a few nights a week. It has mice. Even worse, it still passed inspection. Yuck.

thephoenixnyc

Although it is very unlike me, I have to put these inspections and ratings into my what I don't know won't hurt me file.

I will NOT look up th erestaurants I love in my Murray Hill hood. I will NOT!!! ; )

(shivers at the thought of 137 points)