Letter from the editor: Why we did this project
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.
We see these restaurant food-safety evaluations as a public service.
During the four years I worked in New York City, I came to rely on its restaurant-grading system in deciding where to dine. An "A" posted in the window meant the kitchen had met the city standard for cleanliness. In contrast, a "C" grade was a red flag when it came to food safety.
In Philly, no such government-issued shorthand exists. Instead, restaurant patrons who care about food safety are left to dig through nearly impenetrable restaurant-inspection reports that are posted by the city's Health Department.
The restaurant ratings that we are publishing in this week's City Paper and posting on our website is our effort to make that information more accessible to our readers and to put it in context. Some food safety violations are more serious than others, and our analysis has factored that into our results.
Patrons of Philly restaurants can easily check how an eatery performed, on average, during Health Department inspections over the last five years. Working with food-industry experts and food-safety analysts, we've made our opinions known — awarding four stars to restaurants performing the best, and then down the scale to one star to those with the worst averages.
With this project, a joint effort by City Paper and the AxisPhilly investigative journalism website, we've done what good news organizations traditionally do — sort through a mountain of data, analyze it and share our evaluations — as a public service for our readers.
Our readers can play an important role in helping us keep the database current by letting us know if a restaurant has closed so we can remove it from the list.
It's important to note that this rating system is not meant to be a substitute for government-issued letter grades. We would support that effort in the interests of public health.
But since the Philly government has chosen, so far, not to go down that road, we created this project, our analysis and opinion of the food-safety performance of the city's 3,800 restaurants.
Related stories:
A searchable database of our evaluations of Philly restaurants.
Clean and Safe? Article about our ratings of food safety in 3,800 Philly restaurants.
The methodology we used to create this project.
CP's points for 20 popular restaurants.
