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When you’re searching for a new restaurant, perusing its Yelp reviews is now just part of the process. As crucial as it is to know about the service and quality of food in these online reviews, Yelp will soon become a destination for information of a much more important nature: how the restaurant fared in its last health department inspection.
As WFAA reported yesterday, two Dallas suburbs have started uploading health inspection scores to be displayed alongside a restaurant’s vital information and star rating. Richardson was the first Texas city to launch the pilot program last December. This week, health department officials in Lewisville began adding information to Yelp’s massive restaurant database.
"We’re like anyone else. We dine out, we access Yelp," City of Lewisville health and animal services manager Sherry Harper told WFAA. "We saw it as an opportunity to enhance what we were already doing, a service we were already providing." The service first launched in 2013 in San Francisco, and has since rolled out in Los Angeles and other cities across the country.
Each restaurant will be graded on a scale from 0 to 100, and can give diners insight on how the concept measures up when it comes to food safety and cleanliness. The highly reviewed Fish N Tails Oyster Bar, for example, earned 92 of 100 possible points on its last health inspection. If a restaurant fares poorly, a pop-up message will alert diners that it falls within the bottom 5% of local restaurant scores.
Which, in turn, will probably make you more likely to choose a different spot for dinner. No timeline for when other cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth, will roll out the service has yet been announced.
