Independent · National · Source-linked
There is no national restaurant grade. We wrote down what each state actually does.
Fifty states and the District of Columbia inspect restaurants against fifty-one different sets of rules, publish the results in fifty-one different ways, and agree on almost nothing. This is a plain record of where to look, what the result means, and what to fix.
Start with your own state
Each state page answers four questions: who inspects, where the record is, what the public sees, and whether it must be posted.
Read the record, not the rumor
A single violation is not a verdict, and a clean sheet is not a promise. We explain what your state's report actually measures so you can read one properly.
Find your record before a guest does
Most operators have never read their own last three reports end to end. That is where the repeat violations — the ones that escalate — are hiding.
Ten factors, not a hundred rules
The FDA measures ten practices in restaurants nationally. Nearly every serious citation traces back to one of them.
What we found looking at all fifty-one
Every figure below is counted from the state pages on this site, and every state page links to its government source.
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01
The letter grade is the exception
Only 5 jurisdictions publish a letter grade statewide. Another 8 publish a numeric score. The largest group — 24 of 51 — publishes a narrative list of violations and no summary figure at all. Two states have moved away from scoring entirely in recent code adoptions.
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02
Almost half the country is county business
24 jurisdictions delegate restaurant inspection to counties, districts, or city health departments. In those places there is no single portal to search, no single scoring method, and two restaurants an hour apart can be judged on different scales.
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03
Posting the result is not the norm
We could confirm a statewide legal duty to post the result where customers can see it in 14 jurisdictions. Elsewhere the record is public but effectively invisible unless someone goes looking for it.
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04
The data is public but rarely usable
Machine-readable inspection data exists in some form in only 16 of 51 jurisdictions, and much of that is a single city's feed rather than a statewide one. Several have not been refreshed in years. This is why no honest national grade exists — not because nobody wants one.
See the full comparison table for all 51 jurisdictions side by side.
The tool
The ten-minute self-check
The FDA's own retail food study observes ten specific practices in restaurants: handwashing, bare-hand contact, cross contamination, sanitizing, cold holding, hot holding, cooling, date marking, cooking, and reheating. We turned that list into a walk-through you can do during a slow hour.
It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is submitted, stored, or sent anywhere, and there is no result to be subpoenaed later.
Recognition
We recognize recovery, not perfection
Plenty of lists celebrate restaurants that were already excellent. Almost nothing recognizes the kitchen that took a bad report seriously and fixed it. That gap is the whole point of our recognition program.
Health departments already publish the findings. What almost nobody publishes is what happened next — the process a kitchen rebuilt, the violation that never came back. That is the part we go looking for.
Nominations open. No recipients have been named. This is the first year of the program and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Nominations close 31 December 2026. Verification runs January to February 2027. The inaugural class is published in late spring 2027.
Find out what your state actually publishes
Fifty-one jurisdictions, each with its official lookup, result format, posting rule, and food code edition.