Food Inspectors Average 16 Restaurant Closures A Month: Search Here Before Eating Out
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - Seventeen Sacramento County restaurants were temporarily shut down last month in just two weeks after failing county health inspections. Some of them were well-known, popular restaurants like PF Changs and Round Table Pizza, which got a lot of attention.
We wanted to know just how common it was for restaurants in Sacramento to be shut down due to health inspection red tags. It turns out, 17 closures in two weeks is just slightly above average.
The public list of all the restaurants with recent red tags only goes back two weeks but CBS13 also obtained the list of all the restaurant red tags over the past year through public records requests.
Click here to see recent red tags.
Click here to see every restaurant red-tagged since Jan 2019 (.PDF).
In 2019, Sacramento county issued an average of 20 red tags per month, resulting in an average of 16 individual restaurant closures monthly. There are more red tags than closures because some restaurants get multiple red tags before they're cleared to re-open.
August was the month with the most red tags last year, 42 total. Inspectors only issued 3 red tags in June.
The county website does allow you to look up specific restaurants by name and you can see their most recent inspections.
For instance, records indicate that PF Chang's downtown, which was briefly shut down in January, also got a red tag in four months earlier in September 2019.
Click here to search for a specific restaurant.
While there is no public list of all the restaurants with multiple red tags, the county does publish a list of all the restaurants that have passed their last three inspections. Those restaurants are added to their "Awards Of Excellence in Food Safety" list. If you're looking for a good place to eat, this list is not a bad place to start:
Click here to search Awards of Excellence by Business Name
Click here to search Awards of Excellence by Zip Code
The county warns that, "past inspections are not necessarily indicative of present food safety practices due to changes such as new management, employee turnover, etc., which is addressed by the regular unannounced inspections. Historically, only about one percent of the inspections for retail food permit holders (currently 6,500) results in a red placard/closure."