New York City's Health Department posts the results of every restaurant inspection — every sustained or not-yet-adjudicated violation citation, per the dataset's own description — on the city's open data portal, covering the most recent three years of activity across the roughly 29,000 food-service establishments the agency inspects. Anyone can search a Manhattan restaurant's record before booking a table.
This article explains public records; it is not health or legal advice, and an inspection line item is a citation, not a conviction.
What is actually in the dataset?
Each row is one violation citation from a full or special inspection: the restaurant's name and address, cuisine, the inspection date and type, the violation code and description, the critical-flag status, the score, and the grade where one has been issued. Records are updated on a rolling basis and carry an adjudication status — some citations are contested and later dismissed, which is why a raw recent score can change after the fact.
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How do you search it?
The official path is the city's ABCEats lookup on nyc.gov for a single restaurant, and the DOHMH Restaurant Inspection Results dataset on the open data portal for anything larger — a block, a cuisine, a borough-wide trend. Filter by the most recent inspection type to avoid a false picture from an old cycle; sort by date, not by score alone.
What do the records show for Manhattan?
Aggregate reads of the data consistently find what inspectors say in the field: critical violations cluster around temperature holding and facility surfaces, and scores vary more by inspection cycle than by cuisine. A single citation for a non-critical item tells you almost nothing about a dinner; a record of repeated critical violations over multiple cycles tells you a lot. The useful habit is reading the history column, not the headline grade.
The portal is the primary source and the only one this site treats as authoritative for inspection matters — retellings of inspection stories are exactly where accuracy goes to die. As of May 2026, the dataset remains free, updated, and one of the most browsed civic datasets in the city.