Food Safety Inspections Links

Know before you go

You might be looking forward to a good meal out. But what do you know about the planned eatery stop and how they did on their last health inspection?

Recently a local news broadcast did some investigative reporting revealing the failing restaurant inspection scores of ten restaurants in the city. They promised viewers a link to where they could check up on any restaurant in the county, but did not follow through on that link via their website. More on that in a moment.

Nonetheless, it is important that King County and other counties do these inspections. As someone who is in the industry, I have contracted the dreaded norovirus and other such food poisoning more times than I want to count.

So about that missing link. On this page you’ll find links to every county in Washington State and their food safety program. Not all look or work the same, and some don’t have the actual inspections available online. Quote from a Klickitat County worker – “You’re welcome to drop by the county office anytime and take a look?” Others, like Thurston, post them via the Olympian newspaper. Our link here connects to that.

Kittitas County notes on their site that 1 in 10 inspections are a fail. Wow!

Larger counties such as King, Snohomish and Pierce, as well as smaller ones who have arrived into the 21^st century do post their inspections online publicly.

Since this is Seattle DINING!, we’ll cruise through the navigation of the King County site.

Go to:
http://info.kingcounty.gov/health/ehs/
foodsafety/inspections/search.aspx
and begin searching the database by restaurant name.

When the restaurant comes up, click the plus sign to reveal the recent scores.

If nothing comes up, you can instead put in an address. I usually just type in the street number and that gets me the results I want. If nothing comes up after that, please contact the health department directly as they need to know this ASAP.

I tried a few of my favorites. Wow. You see failure rates back in some cases seven years. I was put at ease with a few and appalled by a few others. Doesn’t matter if someone runs a fine dining establishment, or a strip center pop-in, the scores hold no mercy for those in the money. It’s about how well the place is kept.

Try just putting in the zip code for your neighborhood. That way you can browse all the locations nearby. Click the plus sign, take a look, then click the minus sign to close and move on to the next one.

What these scores come down to is management and training. Regardless of the establishments stature, if you want to sell food to the public it must be handled properly, held at the correct temperatures and all other guidelines must be followed. Management must know these things and the staff must be trained in the same protocol. If an owner can’t do that, consider another way to make a living.

If an establishment is repeatedly failing in the same areas, we have a management issue and your gut doesn’t need to take the hit on that. Find another place to dine.

We have added this page so you can access it anytime from your desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device.

Dine well, dine safely and dine often.

SD!/December 2013