253 Chicago restaurants failed an inspection in the last 60 days

We ran the numbers on September 21. In the 60 days before that, the city recorded 253 failed inspections at Chicago restaurants, after we set aside the national chains we don't track.

That works out to a little over four a day, weekends included. It's in line with the rest of the year. Fails don't spike in summer the way people assume; the monthly count in 2026 has stayed between about 155 and 195 every month so far.

What kind of inspections were they

Complaints, not routine visits, produced the most fails. Of the 253:

• A little over a third were complaint inspections, plus a few short-form complaints.
• A little over a quarter were canvass inspections, the unannounced routine kind.
• Roughly one in six were license inspections.
• The rest were re-inspections, about 15 percent, and two suspected food poisoning investigations.

The re-inspection fails are the ones worth a second look. A re-inspection is the follow-up after a fail, scheduled so the restaurant can show it fixed things. Failing that visit means the problem was still there a week or two later.

How many were serious

Not every fail is a horror story. A restaurant can fail for paperwork, for a missing certified manager, for a hand sink that's blocked by a cart. Those matter, but they aren't the same as live roaches.

Our scoring engine looks at the inspector's notes for things like rodent droppings, roaches, sewage, mold, and temperature abuse, and adds up a severity score. A little under 40 percent of the 253 crossed the line we use for a Standout Inspection, the red banner you see on a restaurant page. Those are the ones where the notes describe an active pest problem or a direct food safety hazard.

Where they were

The Loop had the most fails of any named neighborhood, with 18, which mostly reflects how many restaurants are packed into a small area. Logan Square had 12, Wicker Park and West Loop had 8 each, and Lincoln Park and Lakeview had 7 apiece. Chinatown had only 5, but every one of them was a standout.

The neighborhood pages on this site show the current list for each, updated as new inspections land.

What to do with this

Nothing dramatic. Four fails a day across a city with thousands of restaurants is the normal background rate. The useful move is to check the specific place you're about to eat at, look at whether a fail was followed by a clean re-inspection, and weigh a pattern more heavily than a single bad day.