At least if you think one of the factors for food to be healthy is that it’s prepared under sanitary conditions. I spent a couple of minutes collecting the past few years of restaurant inspection data across NYC, Chicago, and LA, mostly to see what kind of light-hearted data stories were hiding in public records.

This is also the part where I mention that collecting messy public data across multiple sources in a couple of minutes is what my company does. (ask me how!)

In NYC, the cleanest restaurant category I found was doughnut shops. Major fast food chains also did better than average, with Shake Shack coming out on top for average inspection ratings among the group. This is a little disappointing if your worldview requires “artisanal” to mean “cleaner than the mall,” but data is cruel.

In LA, some very expensive restaurants had some very bad sanitation scores. Three separate Michelin-starred restaurants landed in the bottom 5% of sanitation ratings, which put them below virtually every Burger King in the county. In some cases these were one-off inspections at otherwise high-scoring restaurants, but still: if you visit on the wrong day, you might not be getting what you paid for, sanitation-wise.

Chicago had a different lesson, which is that restaurants can apparently breathe a little easier on weekends. Since the start of 2024, the city’s own data shows zero restaurant inspections on Sundays and only four on Saturdays. Apparently Chicago restaurants get a more reliable protected weekend than junior bankers.

There are more interesting findings, but I’ll save those for a future post.

In the meantime, I’ve built an interactive map you can use to find out how your favorite restaurants fared on their latest health inspection.

Open the interactive restaurant inspections map →

If I ran a professional cleaning or maintenance service, this would be my number one lead list. Some of these businesses really need some help.