When the re-inspection fails too

Most restaurants that fail an inspection pass the follow-up. That's how the system is designed to work. The inspector writes up the problems, the kitchen fixes them, and a week or two later someone comes back and confirms. Fail, then pass. You'll see that pairing on hundreds of pages on this site.

The pattern I actually pay attention to is fail, then fail again.

A recent example

In mid-September a shawarma place on North California Avenue failed a complaint inspection. The inspector wrote up 21 violations, including live roaches around the prep area, dozens of flying insects, and mice droppings along the wall base. That's a bad day by any standard.

Two days later the inspector came back for the re-inspection. It failed again, with 11 violations. The notes on the second visit start with the word "still." Still noted pest activity. A live roach on the floor in the prep area. Another on a table under the slicer.

Two days is not a lot of time to fix a pest problem, and I don't think anyone expects a full turnaround that fast. But the second fail tells you the problem wasn't a fluke or a bad afternoon. It was a condition.

What a repeat fail usually means

From reading a lot of these, a re-inspection fail tends to come from one of three places:

• The fix required outside help that hadn't happened yet. Pest control companies book out. Plumbers book out.
• The kitchen cleaned the spots the inspector named and nothing else. Roaches don't stay where they were last seen.
• Management didn't take the first one seriously.

You can't tell which from the report alone. What you can tell is that the restaurant was operating, and serving food, between the two visits.

How we show it

On our site both inspections get the red Standout banner if they cross our severity line, and both get the warning triangle in the inspection history. We stopped ranking one over the other. If two inspections in one week both describe roaches, both of them are the story.

What I'd do

If a place I liked had this pattern, I'd wait for the next result before going back. Not forever. Just until someone from the city has been in and said it's fixed. The history on the restaurant page is there so you don't have to guess.