Restaurant Inspections Online … Starting Tonight

Ever wondered how clean that restaurant you love is? After a bad experience in SLC, we did too. We contacted the Summit County Health Department in order to find out how we could access restaurant inspection reports. We completed a government records request last week and were provided access to recent records today.

We feel that as citizens, we should all have access to all public information, especially about the things we eat. With that in mind, we’ll be posting the inspection for one restaurant tonight, followed by a new inspection every day or two. There are a few things to keep in mind:

• These are point in time inspections. The Health Department finds problems and the restaurants are supposed to correct them. So, hopefully by the time you are reading about an inspection, the problem has been taken care of.
• Every restaurant has “violations” but many are far less egregious than what you have going on at home.
• Inspections are typically performed twice a year. Things change quickly, so your results may vary from what you read on these reports.
• We didn’t realize how important the Health Department and their inspectors are to our dining experience. We said to one of the inspectors during our review, “Wow some of this is pretty scary”. She said, that we had it wrong. We should be glad they found these things and they are fixed. We’ve watched enough Kitchen Nightmares, that after thinking about it, we completely agree with her.
• Our intent isn’t to harm our local restaurants in any way. In fact we want them to succeed. We believe they are the life blood of a tourist location like Park City. That said, we do hold them to a high standard since no one wants to get sick and the average diner only sees about 3% of what’s going on.

So, we hope you’ll find these as interesting as we do. First up tonight is Silver Star Cafe’s 9/25/2014 inspection.