SIX MARKETS.
SIX METHODOLOGIES.

Chicago inspectors hand out real failures, plus a middle ground called "Pass with Conditions" — violations serious enough to warrant follow-up, but not enough to close the door.

What we do: separate real passes from conditional ones. Weight every inspection by recency (the decay curve favors the last 18 months). Penalize critical violations hard. A single recent failure matters. Twenty clean passes over a decade builds confidence.

NYC puts letter grades (A, B, C) in windows. The catch: the city also logs "Pass with Conditions" inspections — violations cited, restaurant stayed open. A failure in spirit, not on paper. And the grade in the window is just the latest snapshot.

What we do: look at the full track record, not just the current grade. Translate "Pass with Conditions" into what it actually is: violations cited. Weight by recency and severity.

NYC's thresholds are calibrated to its own score distribution — applying Chicago's numbers directly would give you a fake comparison.

Dallas gives every inspection a numeric score out of 100. Nearly half of all Dallas inspections fail — a city actually trying to hold restaurants accountable. Which also means a single bad day can look devastating if the latest score is all you see.

What we do: weight the full history with recent scores counting for more, using a recency-weighted deduction formula. One bad day doesn't define a restaurant. One good day doesn't redeem one with a pattern of problems.

Roughly 34% of scored Dallas restaurants land in EAT, 46% in YOUR CALL, 20% in BEAT.

SF also uses numeric scores out of 100, but the bar for "passing" is generous and the public data goes back years. A score from 2019 tells you almost nothing about today's kitchen.

What we do: same formula structure as Dallas — recency-weighted deduction — so the verdict reflects current state, not ancient history.

Same thresholds as Chicago and Dallas. Applying one bar across numeric-score cities keeps the verdicts comparable.

LA County has the most absurd grading system we cover: 96% of restaurants get an A. Read that again. A restaurant with recent critical violations and a recovered C in its history still gets an A in the window. The grade you see is not the signal you think it is.

What we do: ignore the current grade as the primary signal. Look at grade history over the last 18 months, critical violations (4+ point deductions) in the last 12 months, and whether a C was actually recovered or the restaurant is still limping. We call this our "D+" algorithm — it's not based on a numeric score at all.

Roughly 69% EAT, 29% YOUR CALL, under 2% BEAT — still top-heavy, but it reflects what the data actually shows once you stop giving credit for the county's generosity.

Florida ditched the old critical/noncritical split in 2013 for a three-tier system: High Priority violations (direct food-safety risks like temperature abuse and contamination), Intermediate (sanitation, equipment, handwashing facilities), and Basic (floors, walls, lighting). The state's Division of Hotels & Restaurants publishes 5 years of inspection history statewide — every county, every restaurant — for free.

What we do: weight High Priority violations hardest (they're the actual food-poisoning risks), Intermediate moderately, Basic minimally. Apply the same recency decay as our other markets so a 2021 inspection counts less than a 2026 one. Treat "Warning Issued" as a real middle ground — violations were cited and the inspector flagged the place, but the doors stayed open. That's not a clean pass.

Florida's data covers all 67 counties. We don't break it down further yet — county-level filtering shows up as chips on the Florida page. Thresholds are calibrated to Florida's score distribution since the inspection regime differs from the open-data city APIs we pull elsewhere.