Living in NYC is not good for one’s cooking skills. There are just too many mouth-watering options out there that always convince me to eat out rather that stay in line for two hours at Trader Joe’s. Also, this means that my fridge always has room for life essentials such as beer, siracha (aka the juice of gods) and liquor mixers.

Crazy lines at Trader Joe’s

This is why I was both intrigued and amused to find a Restaurant Inspection Results dataset on the NYC open database. Before I walk into any restaurant,  I always look out for the sanitary inspection results just to be sure that if I do get sick that night, it will be from booze rather than food. This dataset contains bundles of information for 20,717 restaurants scattered across the five boroughs, and I thought I’d take a sneak-peek. (Full disclosure: I barely scratched the surface of this dataset, and there are a lot of other things you could do with it!)

With no further ado: first, a distribution of the grades distributed to restaurants in the five boroughs between the span of 2010-2013 (note that P is for “Pending”)

Grades given to restaurants located in the 5 New York borough between 2010 and 2013

In addition to categorical grades A, B and C, it turns out that the good people of the NYC Health and Safety Department also issue scores to each restaurant:

Scores given to restaurants located in the 5 New York borough between 2010 and 2013

We can also look at the diligence of the inspectors by checking the rate of restaurant inspections during each month of the 2007-2013 period:

Number of visits conducted by the Health and Safety department during each month of 2007-2013

Finally, we can check the most common infractions that were encountered in restaurants of the five boroughs during the year of 2013: