Here is the Search: http://houston.tx.gegov.com/media/search.cfm It doesn't look like too many restaurants are listed yet. Is your favorite on here?
I did a search on my zipcode, and there are a couple of places close by that I will now never go to again!
There are a ton of restaurants listed. The Houston Texans training camp and the Nike Pro-City thing are both on there.
I've always been of the "If you don't know, it won't hurt you" mindset when it comes to restaurants. As long as there aren't any rats, bugs, or slime in the ice machine, I'll eat anywhere...
I work at a theater and there are some fairly gross things that happen in our snack bar. Several of my co-workers stick their hands into the ice bins and popcorn machines and grab ice/popcorn with their bare hands when they want a snack. Also, we sell nacho cheese that is past the expiration date. The popcorn scoops aren't cleaned every night. Neither are the pickle and hot dog tongs. Those are things that the company wouldn't approve of...but one of the nastier things to me is that it is actually company policy to put unsold hotdogs in a container (that is rarely cleaned) and reheat them the next day. If I'm working in the snack bar, I don't reuse the hotdogs, but...yeah. I couldn't imagine some of the nasty stuff that happens at real food service businesses.
i worked at some batting cages in high school that had a soda fountain. i decided one day it might be a good idea to take the thing apart a bit and clean it out. when i did, roaches ran out like crazy. roach droppings all over the place. yikes.
The one thing about restaurants I try not to think about is we are eating with spoons and forks used by hundreds of other people, what if the last guy that used it ate his own sh$t or something like that. And if the guy washing dishes that night just washed enough to get the food off of it.
Whoa whoa whoa ... hold on a second here... It shows restaurants as being closed for "Houston Ordinance Violation" and it doesn't show what the violation was. You'll notice that the health violations are defined in the yellow tabs at the top of the page. Now, to me, an ordinance violation may be different from a health violation. I would think an ordinance violation could mean, "You need to have the door open out, not in. You need to have an awning over your exterior door. You need to have wheelchair access here," etc. That stuff may have no reflection at all on the quality of food served.
All you have to do is put your mouse over any of the violations and it gives you a description of the problem and what ordinance they did not follow.
Hmm... when I mouseover, I just get a white box to pop up. I'll try it in Firefox. EDIT: in Firefox, it won't even find the restaurant.
Yeah the restaurant search doesn't work sometimes..just click ont he letters on the bottom and it works fine. You can do it that way to get to different restaurants.
What I love about these inspection reports and the reactions they always get from people is the fact that many of the violations are trivial when you consider the way most people cook in their kitchen. Think about this - how many of your kitchens and the way you prepare and cook food would actually pass these inspections? My guess is not many.
