Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) has conducted official inspections towards all the restaurants in NYC for safety food concerns. According to NYC Health Report, in July 2010 the Health Department began requiring restaurants in all five boroughs to post letter grades summarizing their sanitary inspection scores to help achieve three goals: to inform the public about a restaurant’s inspection results in a simple, accessible way; to improve sanitary conditions and food safety practices in restaurants; and to reduce illnesses associated with dining out.
The report says New Yorkers eat at restaurants almost a billion times every year. Based on Baruch College Survey Research in 2012, 88% of New Yorkers take the grades into account when making dining decisions and 70% concern about getting sick from eating out in restaurants, delis and coffee shops. The letter grades A, B or C are used based on the score ranges below, with dual inspections to encourage restaurants to improve their food safety practices before they are graded.
A = 0 – 13 points (excellent food safety practices)
B = 14 – 27 points
C = 28 points or more
P = Grade pending issued on re-opening due to a closure
Z = grade pending
There are 20506 restaurant across NYC. Based on the cuisine profile/description, we categorized the restaurants into 84 restaurant types. American restaurant has the highest number in all boroughs, while the restaurant type with the lowest number in each borough varies. The stacked bar chart on the first row shows the number of each restaurant types of resturants in each borough. Different colors indicate different types of resturants. If you mouse over any bar and you will see the title of the restaurant type along with the count. The chart shows that Manhattan has most of restaurant types than the other boroughs. This indicates that Manhattan is the most diverse region in NYC.
On the second row, the horizontal bar chart on the left shows the percentage of accumulative grade "A" of each resturant type. Each bar corresponds to a grouped bar chart on the right, which display the distribution of different grades in each borough. If you click on a bar on the left chart, you will see the right chart change according to the bar you click. Based on the chart, Nuts/Confectionary restaurants are the best restaurant type in terms of food safety quality. This type of restaurant even does not have a "C" at all, only few "B" in Manhattan. In contrast, French restaurants have the lowest quality rate of food safety practices.
Each restaurant has been inspected for more than one times to see the improvement progress. According to the following chart, many restaurants have different progress trends based on the scores they have achieved since the first inspection was conducted. This indicates a high variance in the scores trends among the restaurants since many of them have fluctuative score trends. Also, many of the restaurants have higher scores of food safety violation after the last inspections, but at the same time, there are also many restaurants having lower scores at the end. This means that the inspections have not been very effective to make all the restaurants improve their food safety practices. Therefore, it is important for the Health Department to evaluate their current inspection implementation and also to find out why many restaurants have not made better progress as many others have to promote better food safety quality.
If you want to see the distribution of scores and corresponding letter grades each restaurant has been given, you can pick any specific restaurant using the following filtering feature. In the restaurant list box, you will see the restaurant name(s) associated with the score trend line based on your filtering result. If you click one of the restaurant names on the list, the line chart on the right will change accordingly. The arrow within the line chart indicates the increment or decrement of the scores. The less score a restaurant gets for food safety violation, the better grade it will receive. So, if the last inspection score is lower than the first one, a green arrow will pop up, otherwise it will turn red. Green arrow indicates a better food safety quality, while Red arrow indicates worse quality. As you get the restaurants on the box, you can drag out any restaurants that you want to see and compare to the dragging box below the line chart. You can see all the grade history details in each grade time interval. The different color shades represent the different grades.
So, now it's time to explore, compare, and decide which better restaurants you should go and eat!
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