Central FloridaRestaurant Grades

Transparency · How we grade

How we grade restaurants

This method currently grades 2,316 restaurants across 8 Central Florida counties — 63% hold an A, and 285 score a perfect 100. Here is exactly how those grades are calculated.

The most important thing to know first

Florida does not assign letter grades or scores to restaurants. The state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) inspects food establishments and records violations, but it deliberately does not rate or grade them, because each inspection is a snapshot of one moment. The A–F grades and 0–100 scores on this site are calculated by us from DBPR’s public inspection records using the published method below. They are not official Florida grades. We show our exact method so you can judge it for yourself.

Where the inspection data comes from

We use the DBPR Division of Hotels & Restaurants public-records extracts for District 4, which covers the eight Central Florida counties: Orange, Brevard, Volusia, Seminole, Osceola, Lake, St. Lucie, and Indian River. DBPR refreshes these files regularly. Each record includes the establishment’s licensed name and address, every inspection this fiscal year, the disposition of each visit, and the count of violations by severity tier — high-priority, intermediate, and basic. See our data & sources page for the full list.

How we calculate the score

Every restaurant starts at 100 points. From its most recent completed inspection we subtract:

  • 8 points per high-priority violation (the items most directly tied to foodborne illness — temperature control, cross-contamination, pest activity, hygiene)
  • 3 points per intermediate violation
  • 1 point per basic violation
  • An additional penalty when the inspection ended in enforcement: a warning, an administrative complaint, or an emergency closure order
  • A further deduction if the restaurant had any emergency closure in the trailing year, even if since corrected

The result is clamped to a 0–100 range, and we keep the raw number. Grades follow standard bands: A is 90+, B is 80–89, C is 70–79, D is 60–69, and F is below 60. A restaurant with no completed inspection in the current period is marked Not Rated rather than given a default grade.

How we match restaurants to ratings and locations

DBPR data has no map coordinates, ratings, or hours, so we match each licensed establishment to its Google Maps listing using its name, address, and location. We verify every match on both location and name agreement, and we only publish matches we’re confident in — restaurants whose match is uncertain are held back rather than shown with possibly-wrong information. Across our publishable list, about 97% of active establishments had an inspection on file to score.

How dietary tags are assigned

Dietary accommodations (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, halal, and so on) come first from a restaurant’s own stated offerings on Google, which we treat as the strongest signal. For dimensions that aren’t stated outright, we apply an automated classification pass over the restaurant’s name and cuisine. These tags indicate that a place offers options for a given diet — not that it is exclusively that — and they’re a guide, not a guarantee. Always confirm with the restaurant for strict dietary or allergy needs.

Limitations — read these

An inspection is a snapshot; conditions change day to day, and a single report may not reflect a restaurant’s long-term operation. Our score is a heuristic built on top of that public data, not a medical or official safety determination. Google ratings and counts shift over time. We refresh from the source on a regular cycle, and each restaurant page shows when its data was last updated. Found something wrong? Tell us at rohan@centralfloridataste.org and we’ll correct it.

Common questions about Florida restaurant inspections

Short answers first, detail underneath. Every figure below describes the 2,316 restaurants we publish of the 5,997 licensed food service establishments across the 8 counties we cover. 2 restaurants are excluded from grade percentages, having no recent scoreable inspection on file; 2,314 are graded.

Why does Florida not grade restaurants?

Because Florida law never created a grading scheme — the state publishes the full inspection report instead of reducing it to a letter.

DBPR inspectors record every violation they find and publish the report, but no statute directs them to turn that into a grade or score the way Los Angeles County and New York City do. The reports are public in full; what is missing is the summary. That gap is the reason this site exists, and it is why every grade here is labelled as ours rather than the state’s.

Who inspects restaurants in Florida?

The Department of Business and Professional Regulation — DBPR — through its Division of Hotels and Restaurants.

DBPR covers restaurants, bars, food trucks, caterers and hotel kitchens. It does not cover everything that serves food: school cafeterias, hospitals, nursing homes and grocery-store delis fall to the Department of Health or the Department of Agriculture instead. Every record on this site comes from DBPR, so a kitchen inspected by another agency will not appear here.

Are restaurant inspections public record in Florida?

Yes. Every completed inspection is a public record under Florida’s public records law, free to anyone who asks.

DBPR publishes them itself and the underlying data can be downloaded in bulk. Nothing here is privileged or purchased: we take the same public extract anyone can, and what we add is putting it in one place and scoring it consistently. This site currently holds 5,658 inspection records covering 2,316 restaurants.

How often does Florida inspect restaurants?

Most restaurants are inspected one to four times a year, with higher-risk kitchens visited more often.

Frequency is set by the food an operation handles and its risk category, and any complaint can trigger an extra unannounced visit. In our records 1,947 of 2,316 restaurants have more than one inspection on file, averaging 2.4 visits each.

How many violations before a restaurant is closed?

There is no threshold — closure depends on what the inspector finds, not on how many violations are counted.

A restaurant can carry a dozen basic violations and stay open, while a single unresolved hazard — no running water, a sewage backup, live pests — can close one the same day. Across the 2,316 restaurants we publish, inspectors recorded 1,433 high-priority violations in total, and 39 restaurants have an emergency order on record.

Can a restaurant reopen after being closed?

Yes. The suspension lifts once the problem is fixed and an inspector returns to confirm it.

The restaurant corrects the fault, requests a re-inspection, and an inspector visits again. If the finding is resolved the disposition is recorded as Emergency Order Callback Complied and the restaurant reopens. 24 of the 39 emergency orders in our records ended that way.

What is a callback inspection?

A return visit whose only purpose is to check whether a problem found earlier has actually been fixed.

A callback is not a routine inspection. It exists to close out a specific earlier finding, and its disposition records the outcome: complied, not complied, or a time extension. Our records contain 1,116 callback inspections. A restaurant with several is not necessarily worse than average — it means earlier findings were followed up.

Is a B grade restaurant safe?

A B means the inspector found real problems but not many of the most serious kind — no B-grade restaurant we publish carried more than 2 high-priority violations.

In our scale a B is 80 to 89 points, which is roughly two to three intermediate violations or a larger number of basic ones. Of the 442 B-grade restaurants we publish, 119 had no high-priority violations at all at their most recent inspection — so the majority, 323, had at least one. A B is not a clean bill of health; it means the problems found were fewer or lighter than at a C. The grade is ours rather than the state’s, and the violations behind it are listed on every restaurant page.

Violations explained in detail