New York City has upped the dining safety and security of its diners in the form of its new restaurant inspection website, a centralized online source for environmental and health ratings for each of the city’s over 24,000 restaurants. The New York City Health Department performs, on an unannounced annual basis, comprehensive inspections of its every restaurant; certified inspectors conduct technologically-backed tests of these establishments’ respective compliance with the city-wide standards for dining safety set in the following predominant categories: handling of food products; temperature of food; personal hygiene; and control of animal pests and vermin. Following the compliance tests, the inspectors assign to each restaurant a total number of points, corresponding to their amount and degree of regulation violations in the pertinent categories, and the resulting point number constitutes that restaurant’s formal inspection score. In this case, the lower the better for environmentally-and-health-conscious Big Apple diners!
Today, courtesy of the combined efforts of modern technology and the New York City government, you have at your fingertips one-click easy access–via the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene website–to the city-wide inspection results. These results are here meticulously presented on a readily approachable and understandable grading system scale. Through the site’s new advanced search feature, you can conduct your own personal online inspection of any given restaurant, searchable by alphabetic order, neighborhood or city borough, type of cuisine served, and, of course, health inspection score. Moreover, the site then offers, to optimize the ease and convenience of your review, the choice of displaying your search results either as a straightforward list or visually charted on a geographical map. Also notably, it provides direct links to myriad resources for further information on how its inspectors inspect, score, and grade, with detailed facts more than sufficient to satisfy the most discerning, discriminating New Yorkers.
So next time you dine out in New York City, take advantage of the digital age creature comforts gifted you; after all, when it comes to your health, you can never be too secure.