Chicago restaurant inspections, food safety, and the stories behind the data.
Inspector notes mix findings and orders in the same paragraph. Once you learn to split them, a report gets much easier to read.
By Bianca @ IsTheKitchenClean
Chicago sorts every violation into one of three tiers. The tier is right there in the code number, and it's a better guide to severity than the word count.
By IsTheKitchenClean Editor
The Loop, Logan Square, Wicker Park, and the West Loop led the city in restaurant fails this season. Chinatown had fewer, but every one was serious.
By IsTheKitchenClean Editor
For a while, a restaurant could get tagged for rodents because an inspector told it to rodent-proof a door. We fixed that. Here's how the tags decide.
By IsTheKitchenClean Editor
Canvass, license, complaint, re-inspection, and a long tail of oddities. Here's what each type means and how often it happens.
By IsTheKitchenClean Editor
A fail followed by a clean re-inspection is a normal story. A fail followed by another fail two days later is a different one. Here's how to read that pattern.
By Bianca @ IsTheKitchenClean
We pulled every restaurant fail from late July through late September. Here's how they break down by inspection type, how many were serious, and where they were.
By IsTheKitchenClean Editor
Six thousand Chicago restaurant inspections in the last five years ended without anyone looking at a kitchen. Here's what those records mean and how to read them.
By Bianca @ IsTheKitchenClean
The city hands out more than one license number per address. For a while, that split a restaurant's history across two pages. Here's what was going on and what we changed.
By Bianca @ IsTheKitchenClean
It's smaller than you'd think. Here's the data on long-term clean records, and what it takes to maintain one.
By IsTheKitchenClean Editor