Chicago’s Department of Public Health inspects roughly 30,000 food establishments. The results are published on the city’s open data portal — one of the more accessible government datasets in the country. If you know where to look, you can pull up any restaurant’s full inspection history going back years.
But here’s what Chicago doesn’t give you: a number.
Pass, Fail, and the Messy Middle
Chicago uses a pure pass/fail system. An inspector walks the kitchen, documents what’s wrong, and the restaurant either passes, fails, or passes with conditions. That’s it. No score on the door. No letter grade. No numeric rating that lets you compare one restaurant to another.
The inspection report lists every violation found, tagged by severity — critical, serious, or minor. A critical violation means there’s an immediate risk to public health: pest evidence, food temperature abuse, contaminated surfaces. A serious violation is a step below that. A minor violation is operational — missing labels, a soap dispenser that’s empty, a cooler thermometer that’s hard to read.
But the report doesn’t synthesize any of this into a single number. Two restaurants can both “pass” — one with zero violations and one with nine. The pass/fail label treats them identically.
What We Had to Build
Because Chicago doesn’t publish a score, we compute one. Every violation gets weighted by severity. Every inspection gets weighted by recency — recent results count more than old ones. Failed inspections carry a steep penalty. Passes with conditions carry a smaller one. Clean passes get a bonus.
The result is a 0–100 score that reflects the full arc of a restaurant’s inspection history, not just the most recent visit. A restaurant that failed 18 months ago but has passed clean three times since will show recovery in the score. A restaurant that passes every time but racks up six minor violations per visit will show that pattern too.
Chicago’s EAT threshold is 78. Below 50 is BEAT. Everything in between is YOUR CALL.
What Makes Chicago’s Data Interesting
Chicago’s dataset is one of the oldest continuously published municipal inspection datasets in the country. The data goes back far enough to see real trends — restaurants that have been inspected dozens of times, showing improvement or decline over years.
The city also inspects aggressively. Restaurants with prior violations get re-inspected more frequently. Complaint-driven inspections are common. The result is that Chicago restaurants tend to have more data points per establishment than most other cities we cover, which gives the scoring model more to work with.
The flip side is that more inspections means more opportunities to catch violations. A Chicago restaurant with 15 inspections on file will almost certainly have some violations in the record, simply because it’s been looked at more times. A restaurant in a city that inspects once a year has fewer chances to get dinged — which doesn’t mean it’s cleaner. It means it’s been observed less.
More data is better data. Chicago gives us a lot to work with.
Every score on Eat or Beat is computed from public health-department records. We don’t visit restaurants. We don’t accept payments from restaurants. We translate what’s already on file.