Why this exists

Published by Tanooki Studios LLC, a Florida company. Built and run by Maddie, on her own, from Osceola County — the county she then pointed this thing at first, which felt only fair. More about her here. It is not funded, not sponsored, and not for sale. There is no advertising on any page and there never will be.

No restaurant can pay to be taken off this site, to have a grade changed, to be left out of a ranking, or to be put into one. That offer will be made — it gets made to everyone who publishes this kind of thing — and the answer is no. If somebody tells you otherwise, they are lying, and we would like to know about it.

The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, Division of Hotels and Restaurants — the agency that licenses and inspects food service in this state. DBPR publishes its inspection, licensing and disciplinary records as public data extracts under Chapter 119, Florida Statutes. We download those every night and republish them.

We do not edit them. Not the wording, not the spelling, not the punctuation. If a finding on this site reads oddly, that is because an inspector typed it that way at the end of a long shift, and correcting it would quietly make us the author of a record we did not write.

Inspection records begin July 2023. That is not our choice — it is how far back DBPR's downloadable inspection files currently go. Fines and disciplinary actions reach back to 2015, because the state publishes those separately. Coverage is Florida.

Every page is built from that data. If a run above is stale, so is the page you were just reading — and that is worth telling us about too.

Check the state's own record first, via the link on the restaurant's page — ours can only ever be as current as their latest extract, and a return visit often clears findings that stay visible here by design.

If it still doesn't match, that's our bug and we want it. Email corrections@eatsafelyinflorida.com with the restaurant and what's wrong. If the state's record is itself wrong, that correction has to be made with DBPR, and we'll pick it up on the next pull.

Restaurants in the Hall of Fame can have a printed certificate, free. It says which public records earned it and it cannot be bought — that is the entire value of it. Email hello@eatsafelyinflorida.com from an address at the business.

Florida does not issue letter grades. Every grade on this site is ours — a summary of the state's records, computed the same way for every kitchen, and published in full so you can disagree with the exact line you disagree with. The whole formula is here.