A real New Yorker isn't scared of B- or even C-graded restaurants when it comes to dining out, but we still like to be informed.
An interactive map called Safe Dining NYC logs the more than 25,000 restaurants scattered across the five boroughs, letting users sort them by the cuisine or dishes they sell. Clicking on a particular restaurant location reveals its name, the number of points it scored on its most recent Health Department inspection (the fewer the better), its average number of points scored, and a list of recent food safety code violations.
The map also categorizes restaurants based on the results of their inspections. You can isolate eateries with vermin issues, those classified "the worst of the worst," those that consistently perform well, and those that have been closed — though not necessarily permanently — by the Health Department.
Safe Dining NYC mines the open data on restaurant inspections available here and describes itself as a "real-time project," so it should be regularly updated.
The DOH offers a similar online tool to look up the health inspection results of any restaurant, but it's definitely not as attractive.
