Restaurants vary, from their food and decor to their cleanliness standards. When dining out, patrons have an unspoken expectation of quality and cleanliness, but sometimes this expectation can go unmet.
Knowing whether a restaurant had recent health violations can empower diners to make informed decisions about where they eat.
Individual restaurants or restaurants of a certain kind are searchable. This includes fast food restaurants, food trucks, traditional sit-down restaurants and everything in between. Inspections are also searchable by the locality and ZIP code they occurred in.
Every health district also has its own searchable inspection page, such as this one for the Roanoke City and Alleghany Health District.
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It’s not always easy to decode what the reports mean. Unlike states like North Carolina that issue letter grades to restaurants, there is no such shorthand in Virginia. Instead, diners must make decisions from reports that sometimes provide minimal context. While an information page is provided, it doesn’t cover everything that might be found in a report.
Using the state’s online restaurant inspection portal, diners can see which restaurants were inspected multiple times in a year, which ones avoided potential violations by maintaining health and cleanliness standards and what the inspector sees that the average patron doesn’t.
Cardinal is working to fill that knowledge gap. Our Restaurant Stories series, now in its third month, provides guidance on how to navigate inspection data. While the series currently focuses on restaurants in the West Piedmont Health District, health inspectors all operate under the same standards, regardless of where they work. Check out the most recent installment here.