Four cities. Four grading systems. One surprising truth about what actually makes restaurants fail their inspections.
Every major city grades restaurants differently. NYC uses letter grades that hang in the window. Chicago just says pass or fail. San Francisco gives a numeric score. London rates you 0 to 5. We analysed them all.
Chicago is the hardest city to pass a health inspection. 22% of restaurants fail outright — compared to just 7% getting a C in NYC. San Francisco's scoring is the most granular, but only 41% score "excellent." London's system is the most forgiving: 70% get the top rating.
This is every graded restaurant in all five boroughs of New York City. Green dots are A grades. Yellow is B. Red is C. Click any dot to see the restaurant, its score, and what went wrong.
Manhattan has the highest concentration of A grades (82%). The Bronx and Queens trail at 76% — a 6-point gap that maps directly onto restaurant density and inspection resources.
Not all boroughs are graded equally. Here's the breakdown of B and C grades — the ones that mean problems were found.
Chicago's inspection system is binary. You either pass or you don't. No letter grades, no partial credit. And one in five restaurants fails.
The red dots are outright failures. The yellow dots are conditional passes — restaurants that passed with conditions that must be corrected. Together, 40% of Chicago restaurants have some form of issue on their latest inspection.
SF uses a 0–100 scoring system — the most granular of any city. A perfect score is rare. Most restaurants hover between 80 and 95. Below 80 means serious problems.
70% of Westminster restaurants have the top rating of 5. Only 5% are rated 2 or below. London's system is based on penalty points — and most restaurants keep their score low enough to stay at 5.
Across all four cities, with completely different inspection systems and grading scales, one violation appears in the top 3 everywhere: food not held at the correct temperature.
Cold food too warm. Hot food too cold. It's the single most predictable point of failure in any restaurant — and the easiest to prevent with consistent monitoring.
Red = top 3 violation in that city. Orange = top 5. Yellow = common but not top 5. Based on inspection data from each city's open data portal.
Temperature is the universal failure point. In NYC it's the #1 critical violation (7 penalty points). In London, it's the most common reason for losing points in the hygiene category. In Chicago, it's the most cited reason for outright failure. One daily temperature check could prevent the most common inspection violation in any city in the world.
In NYC, restaurants with simpler operations — donut shops, coffee shops, sandwich counters — overwhelmingly get A grades. Restaurants with complex prep — multiple raw proteins, extensive cooking, diverse ingredients — struggle more.
This isn't about any specific cuisine being "dirty." It's about operational complexity. A donut shop fries dough at one temperature. A restaurant cooking tikka masala, tandoori chicken, and biryani simultaneously is managing multiple raw proteins, multiple temperature zones, and extensive cross-contamination surfaces. More complexity = more points of failure.
The restaurants that need the most systematic food safety processes are exactly the ones least likely to have them. Paper checklists don't scale to complex kitchens. Digital systems do.
Blueroll automates daily temperature checks, cleaning logs, and food safety documentation for restaurants. One app replaces your entire paper system.
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