Submission: What's the Safest Food in New York City?

Check out these NYC restaurant heatmaps created by dfkoz using the NYC OpenData “Restaurant Inspection Results” dataset:

In my last post, I used NYC OpenData’s Restaurant Inspection Results to generate a heatmap of restaurant density in New York City. While there are more heatmaps to come, I thought I’d tackle a slightly different question for today’s post: what’s the safest cuisine in New York City? Hint: it’s not this.

First, let’s get a few basics out of the way. There are about 24,000 restaurants in the city. Of these, the most popular cuisines are “American” (25.6%), Chinese (10.0%), “other” (5.4%), pizza (5.2%), and Italian (4.3%). The least common are Chilean (1), Polynesian (1), Czech (2), and Iranian (2). Bagel/pretzel joints represent only 0.76% of restaurants — too low in my opinion. Perhaps we can close down some of the 398 donut shops (1.66%) to make room.

The New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (can someone please explain what mental hygiene is?) performs an unannounced inspection of each restaurant at least once per year. Restaurants are then assigned a grade that must be prominently displayed on the restaurant’s storefront. If a restaurant has too many violations, the DOHMH can also close the restaurant until the violations are addressed. Like so:

Since starting inspections, the city has awarded 40,700 A, B, C, or P(ending) letter grades and cited nearly 500,000 health code violations. Citations include everything from the suspicious (“Duties of an officer of the Department interfered with or obstructed.”), to the disturbing (“Toxic chemical improperly labeled, stored or used so that contamination of food may occur”), to the amusing (“Personal cleanliness inadequate. Clean outer garment, effective hair restraint not worn”).

How do the citations break down by cuisine type? In the charts below, I’ll be using VPR (violations per restaurant) for each type of cuisine, and ignoring all cuisines with less than 35 restaurants.

None of these come as a huge surprise, though there were some interesting results in the full list: tex-mex (15.67 VPR) did much better than Mexican (18.64). Bagels/pretzels (19.48) had a disturbingly high VPR, while vegetarian food (16.19) lived up to its healthy reputation. Almighty pizza (17.07) was middling.

Granted, violations are very different from overall grades and — worse yet — outright closure by the DOHMH. Nevertheless, violations are strongly correlated with poor grades.

So, how about those grades anyway? Of the 40,700 grades awarded overall, 65% were A’s, 24% were B’s, 10% were C’s, and 1% were P’s (which is effectively a C, I believe.) In the data below, a 3 is equivalent to an A, while a 1 equals a C/P, so each cuisine is awarded the equivalent of a GPA. Here are the cuisines with the highest and lowest GPAs:

Note that Chinese/Japanese, Chinese, and Japanese are all different categories. So you can have Chinese OR Japanese food — but never try to get both at once. The offenders, by the way, really do stand out from the crowd. Here’s what the duration curve of grade scores looks like:

Next, here’s what the grade breakdown looks like for the top 20 most common cuisines. Green is an A, yellow a B, and red a C/P:

Finally, you can find the comprehensive list of VPR and GPA by cuisine below. But the overall lesson is clear here, folks: if you keep eating healthy foods like burgers, donuts, and ice cream, you’re gonna be ok.