How clean are Philly restaurants? Find our evaluations here
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
City Paper and Axis Philly evaluated food safety and hygiene in Philly's 3,800n restaurants. The evaluations in this database reflect our opinion, based on publicly available Health Department inspection reports of city restaurants over the last five years. The city agency's records are posted online but are nearly impentrable. This project makes that information easily accessible and puts them in context.
Our food-safety consultant awarded points to each of 56 categories of potential violations, with 3 for the most serious violation and 1 for the least serious. Extra points were added to reflect any enforcement actions taken by the city against a restaurant.
For each restaurant, we added up all the points, and divided that total by the number of years inspected to get an average score. The lower the number of points, the better the restaurant's performance.
Those with the best performance on average were awarded four stars. Those with the worst showing on average got one star.
