Every restaurant the Health Department inspected, sorted into 50+ cuisines and placed where it stood. Drag the year to see which kitchens opened, spread and disappeared. Pick up to three cuisines to compare them, or switch to the diversity view to see how many cuisines share a few blocks.
Restaurants open on July 1 of each year (October 1 for 2026). The shaded years fall between archived snapshots and are estimated.
Share of ethnic restaurants by region of origin. Click a band or legend entry to break that region into its cuisines.
NYC Health Department restaurant inspection results. The live dataset only lists restaurants that are open now, so earlier years are rebuilt from 13 copies saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (2015–2026). Together they cover 63,000 restaurants, including tens of thousands that have since closed.
Mostly from the cuisine label inspectors give each restaurant. Some labels are too broad, so a restaurant’s name can narrow them. A “Coffee/Tea” shop named Qahwah House becomes Yemeni, and a “Spanish” spot with Quisqueya in its name becomes Dominican. Name-based cuisines (Yemeni, Dominican, Himalayan, Jamaican and others) are undercounts. Chains such as Chipotle are left out, and so are American, pizza, coffee, bakery and similar labels.
Opening is the first pre-permit inspection when we have one. Otherwise it is estimated from the restaurant’s permit ID, which the city issues in order. A restaurant closed somewhere between the last snapshot that lists it and the next one. There are no saved snapshots between April 2017 and November 2020, so those years are estimated, and short-lived restaurants from that stretch are missing. A change of ownership can make an old restaurant look new.