How an NYC hackathon project came back to life as GrubVetter

GrubVetter did not start in 2026. It began in 2011 as an NYC BigApps project called NYC Health Ratings. This is the story of how it started, and what it eventually matured into: GrubVetter.

Where it started (2011)

New York City had just begun publishing its restaurant inspection data, and NYC BigApps, the city's open-data competition, was a good excuse to do something with it. The idea was simple: type in a restaurant and see its health grade and violations before you ordered.

• Search by name, or find well-graded spots near you
• Browse by borough and neighborhood
• Save your regulars with My Restaurants
• A mobile site, a browser bookmarklet, and an early Android app
• A weekly stats dashboard: best and worst neighborhoods and cuisines, and grade trends by borough

Not bad for a side project. And if that layout looks familiar, it should: GrubVetter has neighborhood pages like it in every city today.

Then it went quiet (around 2015)

In 2015, the city completely changed the format and schema, and the pipeline that fed everything broke. Rebuilding it properly was something I always meant to do, but doing it right meant a complete rewrite from the ground up.

Back, as GrubVetter

I never forgot about it. The project always felt unfinished, so in April 2026 I came back to it. A lot had changed while it sat: most city health departments had consolidated onto a handful of common formats for publishing this data, and that semi-standardization made a real multi-city strategy far more approachable than it would have been in 2011.

The data was still public, the need was still there, and the only thing missing was a foundation that wouldn't break the next time a city changed something.

So GrubVetter is a ground-up rebuild, built to cover many cities from the start: a proper data pipeline, with native apps for iPhone and Android. The same idea from 2011, done right, and no longer tied to one city.

Eight cities, more on the way

GrubVetter is live in eight cities today: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Austin, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, with more on the way. It's free, and every grade comes from the respective health department of each city.

Get the app

• iOS: Download on the App Store
• Android: Get it on Google Play

Or use it right in your browser at grubvetter.com.

What is next

More cities, for a start. Ideally, we want to cover every city and county that publishes inspection data, so that checking a restaurant's grade works anywhere you go, across the country and eventually beyond it.

Eventually, community reviews on top of the inspection data, so you get both the official grade and the word on the street in one place. The inspection data was always the foundation. Now we get to build on it.