A Florida restaurant inspection means something different in every county.
Every Florida restaurant inspection is public, and sites that republish them show the raw violation count.
But the raw count depends heavily on where the restaurant is. InspectLens compares each inspection with its own county,
then rolls stores up by brand.
Going out? Look up a restaurant
Every inspection of 80,823 restaurants since July 2023: what the inspector found, what happened next, and the county average for context.
Each brand page links the history of the dishes the brand is known for. The stories live on PlateTales.
For owners and buyers: the county effect
1.54Palm Beach: high-priority violations per routine inspection, FY2024-25, n = 8,511
0.35Polk County: same measure, same year, n = 2,476
116,597routine inspections in Florida, FY2024-25 (July to June); state average 0.98
High-priority violations per routine inspection, by county, FY2024-25
39 counties with at least 300 routine inspections in FY2024-25; every routine visit counted, as in DBPR's file.
Range 0.20 (Santa Rosa) to 1.99 (Nassau). Hover a bar for its sample size. All 67 counties are on the county page.
How InspectLens adjusts
One measure. High-priority violations at the first visit of each routine inspection (callback re-visits are not counted in scores).
A local baseline. The average for the same county and fiscal year. In FY2024-25 that baseline runs from about a quarter to nearly two violations per inspection depending on the county.
The difference. Each inspection is scored as observed minus baseline, so a store in Palm Beach is compared with Palm Beach and a store in Polk with Polk.
Roll-ups with honest uncertainty. Brands are scored over 3 fiscal years (2023-24 to 2025-26), ranked only inside their segment, only with at least 30 stores and 50 inspections, and always with a 95% interval.
Same brand, different county. Subway's 970 scored Florida stores average 0.58 high-priority violations per routine inspection,
against a county baseline of 1.11 where they operate: -0.53 relative to the county (2,846 inspections, FY2023-24 to FY2025-26).
See the Subway page.
Reviewed chains vs every other licence
-0.38Reviewed chains: high-priority violations per routine inspection relative to the county baseline (95% interval -0.39 to -0.37; 12,599 stores, 48,703 inspections)
+0.08All other licences: high-priority violations per routine inspection relative to the county baseline (95% interval +0.07 to +0.09; 57,422 stores, 232,519 inspections)
"Other" includes chains not on the reviewed list of 108 brands, so it is not the same as independent restaurants.
PizzaThe Origin of Pizza: From a Bishop's Rent to NaplesPlateTales
BagelsWhy Bagels Have Holes, From 1394 Kraków to the Lower East SidePlateTales
NachosWho Invented Nachos? Ignacio Anaya and the 1940 Paper TrailPlateTales
CoffeeThe History of Coffee: From Yemen's Sufis to BrazilPlateTales