About Eat or Beat

Every city inspects its restaurants. The results are public record. But try actually finding them — you'll end up on a government database built in 2004, searching by license number, decoding violation codes that mean nothing to a normal person. The data exists. It's just buried behind interfaces nobody can use.

Eat or Beat exists because that's a stupid problem to have in 2026. Public health data should be public. Not "technically accessible if you know the URL and have an hour." Actually public. Searchable. Readable. Useful when you're standing on the sidewalk deciding where to eat dinner.

So we built it. We pull official inspection records directly from city and county health departments, translate the bureaucratic language into something you can understand in five seconds, and tell you the truth: EAT, YOUR CALL, or BEAT.

115,499+ Restaurants tracked

5 Cities live

318,640+ Inspections analyzed

Weekly Data updates

Why it matters

Yelp tells you if the pasta was good. Google tells you if the wait was long. Nobody tells you if the kitchen passed its last health inspection — or what the inspector found in the walk-in cooler. That's the gap. You should be able to find out without navigating a government database from the Bush administration.

What we are (and aren't)

An independent data project. We don't take money from restaurants, write reviews, or rate food quality. We take public government data and make it useful.

We aren't health inspectors and we aren't affiliated with any city government. Our verdicts are editorial analysis — an independent interpretation of public records, not an official rating. Every score traces back to an official inspection record, and every restaurant page links directly to the city's data portal so you can verify it yourself. We're showing our work.

Every city is its own mess

There's no national standard for health inspections. Chicago issues pass/fail outcomes. Dallas gives numeric scores. NYC uses letter grades but also logs "violations cited" inspections that don't quite count as failing. LA County hands out an A to 96% of restaurants regardless of what the inspector found. So we built a different scoring methodology for each city. Here's the full breakdown.

The team

Eat or Beat is built by a small independent team. No venture capital, no sales department. Just data people who think public information should actually be usable.

Get in touch

Questions, feedback, or corrections: hello@eatorbeat.com

If you're a journalist, researcher, or health department and want to discuss our data or methodology, we're happy to talk.