This is a map of restaurant and food-establishment inspection ratings for King and Snohomish counties. The inspection records are already public, but they're spread across two county systems and aren't easy to browse or compare. This puts both counties on one map, lets you filter and sort it, and makes it possible to see patterns that aren't obvious when you look up one place at a time.
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Both are public inspection records. The map refreshes from those sources on a regular schedule, so ratings update as new inspections are posted.
Every establishment is placed on the same four labels — Excellent, Good, Okay, Needs to Improve (lower is better) — but the two counties produce them differently.
King County publishes its own rating, and this map uses it as-is. King calculates it from the average of a restaurant's critical (red) violation points across its last four routine inspections, with the cutoffs between categories set relative to how all King County restaurants score, plus rules for recent closures and repeat re-inspections. King's full methodology is published here.
Snohomish County doesn't publish a summary rating, so this map derives one from the violation points on the most recent inspection, where more points mean more or more serious violations:
| Violation points | Rating |
|---|---|
| 0 | Excellent |
| 1–15 | Good |
| 16–35 | Okay |
| 36 or more | Needs to Improve |
The same thresholds are used for the small number of King County establishments that are inspected but not graded, such as some schools and institutional kitchens.
Because King's rating averages several inspections and counts only critical violations, while the Snohomish-derived rating is the full score of a single inspection, the two aren't calculated the same way. They share the same labels so both counties can sit on one map, but a King "Good" and a Snohomish "Good" come from different formulas.
You can filter the map by cuisine and shade it by different measures, including:
There's also a stats view that aggregates ratings by area, either by census tract or by map tiles that get smaller as you zoom in.
The history-based measures (average, worst on record, how often routines come back poor) are calculated the same way from raw inspection points in both counties, so they're the most directly comparable views across the county line.
One pattern stands out in the data: inspection scores track closely with the kind of food a place makes. Restaurants that cook a lot from scratch — handling raw ingredients, holding food hot and cold, and doing more steps by hand — tend to accumulate more violation points than places like coffee shops, bakeries, and bars.
This isn't a statement about cleanliness. A kitchen doing complex prep simply has more points where an inspector can find something, so it carries more risk on paper than a place that mostly pours drinks or sells pre-made items. Comparing those two on raw score isn't a fair comparison.
Because of that, the map has a "vs cuisine norm" view. Instead of coloring each place by its absolute rating, it colors each place by how it compares to the average for its own cuisine. A chicken restaurant that does better than most chicken restaurants shows up as strong, even if its raw score is middling for the map as a whole. This is the most useful way to read the data if you want to know which restaurants stand out among their peers, rather than which cuisines are harder to inspect.
An inspection is a snapshot of one visit. The result depends on timing and on the inspector, and many violations are about record-keeping or temperatures rather than anything you'd notice as a customer. A single good score doesn't guarantee a good experience, and one bad inspection doesn't mean a place is unsafe. The history-based measures are steadier than any single rating, which is why they're included.
Snohomish County's online records only go back a few years, so "years on record" and long-term history are shorter there than in King County.
This is an independent project. It isn't affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by King County, Snohomish County, or any health department. The data is pulled from county records and processed automatically, so some details may be off, such as a misplaced pin or a cuisine guessed incorrectly. For authoritative inspection information, or to correct a restaurant's record, check with the county directly:
Inspection data: Public Health — Seattle & King County, and the Snohomish County Health Department.
Map tiles: © OpenStreetMap contributors, and © CARTO (neighborhood-trends map). Demographic context on the trends map is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.