Clean Plate
How to read a grade
A grade describes one inspection on one day. Here’s what it tells you, what it doesn’t, and how this site shows it.
A grade reflects one day
An inspector visits, scores what they find, and posts a letter. That letter stays in the window until the next visit — which may be next month or next year. So a letter on its own tells you almost nothing until you know when it was earned. That is why no grade appears anywhere on this site without its date and the kind of inspection that produced it, and why a grade older than 365 days is labelled as old wherever it appears.
The newest grade is the one shown
Inspectors make several kinds of visit, and most of them end with a grade: in some states a letter posted at the door, in others a score that sets the letter. When a place gets a B, it can ask for a follow-up, and if that earns an A, the A replaces the B. So the grade shown is from the most recent graded visit, follow-ups included. Facility pages list every earlier grade beneath it, so a B that was later fixed stays visible.
Not everything here is a restaurant
A food permit covers school kitchens, hospital cafeterias, grocery service counters and mobile units as well as restaurants. Anything that is not a restaurant says so on its card and on its page. A school kitchen with a B is not somewhere you were going to eat.
Reports come straight from the agency
Every inspection with a published report links to the agency's own report. The agency's copy is the record of authority; a mirror here would go stale the moment a report was amended, and you would have no way to know. If a fact on this site matters to you, follow the link and read the report.
Corrections
This site republishes public records; it does not create them. If a grade or an address is wrong here, it is almost certainly wrong upstream, and the publisher is the only party who can correct it. Each jurisdiction's source is linked on the data page. If the error is ours — a page showing something the source does not — the extract that produced it is identified there by commit.
City profiles
Some cities also have a profile of the place around the restaurants: population, income, housing, commuting, education and health, from the Census Bureau and other public agencies. Every figure names its source and vintage, and an estimate with a wide margin of error is marked as one. Start with Greenville or Charleston, or see every city profile.