Restaurant inspections

About restaurant inspections

In San Francisco, more than 7,000 restaurants, bars, markets, bakeries, pushcarts, stadium food facilities and others are inspected by the Department of Public Health. In this section of EveryBlock, you can find out if the takeout place down the block isn't thawing its food properly or if your favorite bagel place has evidence of rodents.

Our records come directly from the health department and include the restaurant's location, the date it was inspected, the restaurant's name, the inspection score, a list of any violations and, sometimes, notes from inspectors.

Also included is the restaurant's "type" — which is a way of putting facilities into categories such as pushcarts, senior nutrition centers and sit-down restaurants of various sizes. Finally, we include the inspection type, which can be routine, caused by a change in ownership, a reinspection or a variety of other classifications.

Source

The data comes from the restaurant scores dataset from the DataSF system as reported by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Every Wednesday, we at EveryBlock retrieve the data, which covers the previous week, and publish it immediately thereafter.

The department also maintains a public database of restaurant violations and scores that is updated on the same schedule.

What else should I know about the inspection information?

Because of the schedule by which we at EveryBlock get the data (see above) and the health department's reinspection schedule, it is possible that a restaurant may have passed a reinspection and corrected all violations without a record of those corrections here on EveryBlock.

If a restaurant is inspected on the first of the month and found to have a number of violations, we will report that when we get the data. Three weeks later, the same location may be reinspected and found to have all of the violations corrected. In this instance, the initial record of inspection will remain in our system, subject to search, but we will update that record to include a link to the reinspection result.

You can learn more about the inspection process on the Food Safety Program section of the health department's Web site.