The New York City health department begins letter-grading restaurant inspections, designating an A, B or C to rate the cleanliness of more than 24,000 restaurants in the five boroughs, it is also activating a new Web site that will “offer much more information and be more user-friendly,” said Daniel Kass, a deputy commissioner.
“There is no shortage of sources of information on restaurants,” Mr. Kass added, “but there is no other central source to find information about restaurants’ hygiene practices. We hope that this Web site will help spread the food safety message.”
The Web site displays restaurants’ current A, B or C letter grades and the specifics of their violations, and is designed to allow searches by restaurants’ first names or even first letters, by letter grades in specific ZIP codes, by boroughs and by dates of inspection. It also offers maps of restaurants’ locations, and Google street views of the restaurants’ exteriors.
The Web site also enables users to search the sanitary grades according to the type of cuisine (dozens are listed, from “Afghan” to “Vietnamese/Cambodian/Malaysian”).
“We’ve been wanting to improve our Web site for a long time, but we waited until we could incorporate the new letter-grade ratings on our page,” said John La Duca, the department’s director of online editing. He said a dialog box — called a widget — on the home page will permit readers to type in restaurants’ names for their latest inspection results. This widget, he said, can be installed on other Web sites or home pages — for example, on the Zagat Survey’s online version, or on bloggers’ sites, or Facebook and other social media platforms — to permit quick access to the inspection ratings from places other than the department’s home page.
Inspection results on the site were formerly updated weekly, Mr. Kass said. “Now, in most cases, it will be updated daily, when it is uploaded overnight from the inspectors’ hand-helds,” he said, referring to the portable computers in which inspectors enter restaurants’ cleanliness scores.
