About

How this site works

This site republishes food establishment inspection records from the City of Boston Inspectional Services Department's public dataset so they're easier to search, browse and read - by name, street or neighborhood, with full history for each establishment.

Where the data comes from

Every record comes from the city's Food Establishment Inspections dataset on data.boston.gov, republished under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License. We refresh the site weekly from that feed. The city's dataset may lag recent inspections or contain errors - for the authoritative record, check the source.

What result codes mean

Inspection outcomes appear as city status codes like HE_Pass or HE_Fail. Boston publishes no public legend for these codes, so we show them verbatim and never convert them into scores, grades or ratings of our own.

What this site doesn't tell you

An inspection record shows conditions at the moment of one inspection. It doesn't tell you whether a place is safe to eat at today, and a violation listed here may have been corrected the same day. Establishments with no recent inspection activity simply don't appear.

Aggregates

The overview page's counts and charts are our own arithmetic over the city's raw records, recomputed at each refresh.