There is no national standard for restaurant health inspections in the United States. The FDA publishes a Food Code. States can adopt it, adapt it, or ignore it. Cities layer their own rules on top. The result is a patchwork so incoherent that identical scores in different cities can mean completely different things.
How Different Are We Talking?
Some cities use pass/fail. The inspector documents violations and the restaurant either passes, fails, or passes with conditions. No number on the report. If you want to compare restaurants, you have to read the violation lists yourself.
Some cities publish a numeric score. The inspector tallies deductions and the restaurant walks away with a number out of 100. Higher is better. Straightforward — except the deduction rules, violation categories, and severity scales vary by jurisdiction.
Some cities use letter grades. A, B, or C, posted in the restaurant window. The most consumer-visible system, but the grades are computed differently depending on where you are. A “B” in one city might mean something very different than a “B” in another.
And at least one major jurisdiction scores backwards — you start at zero and accumulate penalty points. Lower is better. If you’re used to thinking of 90 as a good score, this system will confuse you until you realize the scale is inverted.
Why It Matters
The CDC estimates that roughly one in six Americans gets sick from contaminated food every year. The inspection system is the primary mechanism for catching problems before they reach your plate. And that system changes completely depending on which side of a city line you’re standing on.
A restaurant in one city and a restaurant across the border — separated by a street — can operate under entirely different inspection frameworks. Different scoring. Different violation categories. Different thresholds for failure. Different rules about what gets posted publicly.
What We Did About It
Eat or Beat produces the same four verdicts — EAT, YOUR CALL, BEAT, UNRATED — regardless of city. The scoring paths are different because they have to be. The output is the same because you deserve a straight answer regardless of where you’re eating.
We’re not arguing for one system over another. Every approach has tradeoffs. But nobody was translating between them. So we did.
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.