Stanislaus County does health inspections for 2,400 restaurants. Results aren’t easy to find
Are there roaches in the kitchen of your favorite Stanislaus County restaurant? Clogged sinks? Slime? Improperly stored food?
The Stanislaus County Department of Environmental Resources has a website where community members can view health inspection reports “from March 2006 to the present,” according to the site.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds to find these inspection reports, which are generally considered public records.
The website isn’t kept up to date — unlike in other counties across California — and it’s difficult to search for restaurant health inspections by the most recent ones or without knowing specific details, The Modesto Bee found during a four-week-long investigation.
The majority of the 2,400 permitted food service establishments in Stanislaus County receive two routine unannounced food safety inspections per year, according to the department. The website says inspection reports are scanned weekly.
You can search, but you have to know what you’re looking for
Here’s how to access food safety inspections via the county’s food facility inspections online database.
If you press the “continue” button on the homepage of the website, https://secure.stancounty.com/FoodFacilities, you will be brought to a search engine. There, you can search inspection reports by food facility name, street name and/or city.
As of Friday, the website did not have an option to see a list of the most recent inspections made by the department.
In addition, there didn’t appear to be current health inspection reports available for several well-known restaurants.
A search for Johnny Carino’s, a restaurant at Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto turned up health inspection reports only as recent as 2011.
It was only by searching for Carino’s Italian/NorCal Dale Partners LP, the company that owns Johnny Carino’s, that The Bee was able to locate the most recently updated report — from 2022.
Modesto Bee investigates recent health inspection reports
The Modesto Bee requested from the Environmental Resources Department a list of recent health inspections made at Stanislaus County food facilities.
The department sent a list of 79 food facilities inspections and the dates they were conducted — between Jan. 2 and Jan. 12 —as well as whether the inspections were routine or the result of a complaint, change of ownership or another factor.
No other details were included in the list.
The Bee used the Environmental Resources Department’s search engine to find details from these reports, including information about what was found during the inspections.
Of the 79 food facility inspections identified by the agency to The Bee, only 50 had updated reports listed on the site. However, The Bee received an error message when clicking to look at the details of those 50 reports.
The Bee reached out to the department noting the error messages, and received a response Jan. 26 that the department “forwarded (our) concerns to IT.”
As of Friday, the error message issue had not been resolved.
Food facilities that were inspected during those dates and whose inspection reports were provided to The Bee by the department include Carl’s Jr, Toscana Ristorante LLC, Fire Wings, El Rosal, Little Caesars Pizza, Perko’s Cafe, Golden Chopstix and Papapolloni Bistro.
Do other California counties have up-to-date restaurant records?
The California Retail Code requires local environmental health agencies to have a “standardized electronic format,” for reporting food facility inspection data “in a timely manner” and to “strive to ensure that the information is readily accessible.”
Stanislaus County takes a different approach to making restaurant inspection reports available to the community than Sacramento and other California counties.
While not legally required by California’s Health and Safety Codes, Sacramento County makes inspection reports easily accessible online to the public “in order to increase transparency,” said Ken Casparis, a spokesperson for the Sacramento County’s Environmental Management Department.
This effort is part of the county’s color-coded placard program, which requires food facilities to post colored placards indicating whether they have passed, conditionally passed or failed inspection.
A yellow placard signals two or more major violations, according to the Sacramento County Food Inspection Guide, while a red placard signals “imminent danger to public health and safety” and suspends the health permit until violations are corrected.
In contrast, a green placard means a restaurant passed the inspection.
Stanislaus County does not require food facilities to post the results of their inspections for the public to see. Rather, food facilities must keep a copy of the most recent report at the site and make it available to anyone who wishes to see it.
One of the goals of Sacramento County’s program is to convey inspection results to the public “using a system that is simple to understand,” according to the department’s website.
The department updated its website in July to make it more user-friendly and increase accessibility to assist in reaching this goal, Casparis said.
On the Sacramento County website, users can see a list of the most recent food facility inspection reports, search for specific restaurants and read detailed inspection reports.
The Los Angeles County Environmental Health Inspection website also lists inspection results by most recent. It gives the option to search by facility name, address, city or ZIP code.
The Fresno County Department of Public Health website allows users to search by time period, document type (inspection reports, business plans, etc.), as well as facility name, address, city or zip code.
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