"No Entry" and "Not Ready": the inspection results that aren't results

Every so often someone emails me about a restaurant with a weird gray tag in its history. Not a pass, not a fail. Just "No Entry." They want to know if that's bad.

Short version: it's not a grade. Nobody inspected anything.

No Entry

The inspector showed up and couldn't get in. Sometimes the restaurant was closed at an hour it's normally open. Sometimes there was a locked gate and nobody answering. Sometimes the place had quietly stopped operating and the city didn't know yet. The inspector logs the visit so there's a record, and comes back another day.

In the last five years there have been about 6,000 of these across Chicago's licensed food businesses. That's a lot of wasted trips, but it's also a lot of nothing. A single No Entry in an otherwise normal history means very little.

Where it starts to mean something is in a cluster. Three No Entry visits in a row, with no real inspection in between, is a restaurant the city has been trying and failing to look at. That's not proof of anything, but I'd want to see the next real result before I ate there.

Not Ready

This one is mostly about new places. A license inspection is scheduled, the inspector arrives, and the kitchen isn't finished. Equipment isn't installed, the plumbing isn't hooked up, the walk-in isn't cold yet. The inspector marks it Not Ready and the restaurant tries again.

About 2,000 of these in five years across all food businesses. Almost all of them are attached to License inspections, and almost all of them are followed within a few weeks by a real result. If you see one on a restaurant that's been open for years, it's usually a renovation or a change of ownership rather than anything alarming.

Out of Business

You'll also see this one. The inspector confirmed the place is closed for good. We keep those records because the history is still the history, but we don't count them as a pass or a fail.

How we handle all three

None of these change a restaurant's pass rate on our site in the direction you'd expect. We currently divide passes by every visit the city logged, including these. That's something we're looking at, because a kitchen that passed four times and had two No Entry visits probably deserves to show 100%, not 67%. For now, if a pass rate looks lower than the colored tags in the history would suggest, this is usually why.