Deschutes County restaurant scores online

This is huge: Deschutes County is now posting restaurant inspection scores online and publicly available. Go here to see them.

Every restaurant in the County—even places that are not nominally restaurants, like hotels, or small food counters in other types of establishments—is online, it looks like. You can search by name, city, score, and address, and you can click through to the details for each restaurant, which include:

  • The comments and details of each violation;
  • Date of inspection(s) and subsequent follow-up re-inspection(s);
  • Google Map of the establishment;
  • Graphed view of the score(s);
  • And, of course, the actual score.

Each restaurant is scored on a scale of 100—100 being the best possible score. Each violation reduces the total score, and restaurant scoring less than 70 get the dreaded "Failed to Comply" sticker.

So far, it’s been very interesting to page through all the results… there have been some surprises.

However, the site comes with the following disclaimers:

[From the press release]
Posting restaurant inspection scores is not in any way meant to disparage or benefit any restaurant in Deschutes County. The scores are a reflection of the conditions observed by the health inspector on the day she or he made that inspection.

[From the site]
It must be noted that scores don’t always tell the full story of how a restaurant is performing with regard to safe food handling practices. The scoring system is not perfect and neither are health inspectors or restaurant operators. A low scoring restaurant may never make anyone sick or a high-scoring restaurant may have an outbreak tomorrow. Foodborne illness is an inexact science with MANY risk factors that influence how, when, where, and why an outbreak occurs.

4 comments

  1. *VERY* interesting and enlightening (especially after working in the food industry many years ago)

    Makes you want to go "HMMMM"

  2. Thanks for posting this. Some are not so surprising. Others really shocked me.

    This is great info.

    Any idea what happened to Nannette’s on the east side? Here one day, gone the next.

    Hmmmm.

  3. Just because a restaurant got a low score on the day of inspection does not mean the place is always in that condition. Speaking from experience I know that one employee leaving the lid off his drink,washing their hands in the wrong sink,forgetting to adjust the sanitizer in the dishwasher,leaving the butter out at room temp.,salad dressing past the pull date and not to even mention equipment failures can send a manager or owner into shock. These things all deduct from the score, it does’nt mean we run a filthy restaurant. So keep that in mind when you read this site and slam a place.

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