We have been quietly building. As of this morning, three new tools went live on NYC Restaurant Voice. All free, no sign-up required, no paywall.
1. The Morning Brief
One page, every morning. Real-time weather. Live subway status via goodservice.io. Today’s alternate-side parking. Five brunch spots open for reservation right now — each with their DOH inspection grade displayed inline. And this week’s just-opened restaurants from across the city.
It is the page we wish existed when we rolled out of bed Saturday morning trying to figure out what to do, what to wear, and where to eat. Open the Morning Brief.
2. DOH Inspection Score Lookup
Type any NYC restaurant’s name. See their Department of Health grade (A, B, or C), score, last inspection date, and any critical violations. All sourced from the city’s own CAMIS data.
We are indexing 26,515 restaurants right now. Of those: 20,464 are grade A. 1,744 are B. 419 are C. And there is a 1,027 in pending-grade purgatory worth knowing about.
Same data the city publishes, just made instantly searchable without bouncing through three NYC.gov pages. Search a restaurant.
3. This Week in NYC Restaurants
Every opening, closing, and “coming soon” across the five boroughs. Automatically aggregated from our reporting and the city’s restaurant tracker DB. Updated multiple times a day. No editorial round-up to wait for; this is the round-up, live.
If a place opens Tuesday morning in Williamsburg, you’ll see it Tuesday afternoon at the latest. Browse this week’s moves.
Why we did this
Three reasons, plainly:
Reading a restaurant review shouldn’t be a separate trip from knowing whether the kitchen passed its inspection. Combining the two onto one page is overdue. Now every brunch reservation we recommend in the Morning Brief carries its real DOH grade. You’ll see green badges next to Buvette, Sunday in Brooklyn, Jack’s Wife Freda, Russ & Daughters Cafe. All A grade. All bookable. One tap.
Fragmented information isn’t actually free. Open six tabs to plan your morning and you’ve already spent the attention you were hoping to keep. Putting it on one page is a kindness.
The city’s data should work for the city. DOH publishes 26K restaurants’ inspection records and almost nobody outside of restaurant operators ever looks at them, because the official lookup is genuinely tedious. We just made it less tedious.
What’s next
A daily email goes out at 6:00 AM Eastern starting tomorrow — same content as the Morning Brief. Sign up at the bottom of that page. The Friday edition will include a curated “This Week” digest.
We’re also working on neighborhood hubs (Williamsburg, East Village, Astoria — each with its own restaurant pulse) and a reservation heatmap showing which spots are hardest to book this week. Both later in June.
Send us feedback at [email protected]. Tell us what’s missing.
Leave a Comment