Boston can post a grade from a second inspection rather than the initial visit. Start by matching the restaurant and arranging its dated reports in order; then use the City’s grade-selection rule below. A displayed letter alone does not explain the earlier findings or establish whether a restaurant is currently open.
Match the grade to a dated visit
Open the official Mayor’s Food Court search, which has Business Name and Neighborhood inputs. Confirm the branch address before combining records with similar names. The existing Boston inspection search guide covers broader record matching and separate school-cafeteria records.
For the establishment you mean, make a short timeline with one row per report: inspection date, official score, letter grade, and stated visit type. Keep an unknown visit type marked unknown. Do not infer “second inspection” just because a report is the second item returned by a search.
Read the official score, then the posting sequence
Boston’s grading guidance starts an inspection at 100 points and deducts points per violation: 10 for foodborne critical, 7 for critical, and 2 for non-critical. Its grade bands are A: 94–100; B: 81–93; C: 80 or fewer. Use the City’s recorded score and categories; this guide does not recalculate a facility’s grade.
The same guidance describes which visit supplies the posted letter:
| Inspection sequence | Grade selected for posting |
|---|---|
| Initial inspection earns an A | That initial A. |
| Initial inspection earns below A | A second inspection occurs within 30 days; its grade is posted. |
| Restaurant is dissatisfied with the second grade and pays for another off-hours inspection | The new inspection’s grade becomes the restaurant’s grade. |
When two entries seem to conflict
Compare what each entry describes before treating different letters as a data error. One may describe a particular inspection while another presents the selected grade. Keep the original page or report reference with your notes, including the establishment identity and date. A screenshot clipped to a single letter loses the information needed to resolve the difference.
Suppose, in a fictional example, you can identify an initial B and a second B, followed by an A on a later document whose visit type is unclear. The later date alone does not establish that it was the optional grade-setting inspection. Ask the City which visit supplied the posted grade instead of silently assigning the later report a purpose. Leave that part of your timeline unresolved until the record or agency answers it.
Also avoid adding violation rows from different dates into one score. That would mix visits and create a result the City did not issue. If two downloaded files appear to describe the same visit, retain their dates and versions and ask which is the final report; do not count them as two inspections without checking.
What Boston’s open inspection data shows, and what it leaves out
Boston also publishes a Food Establishment Inspections dataset on Analyze Boston, which the City describes as a legacy dataset of individual inspections and results. On October 20, 2026 it held rows from April 2006 through October 16, 2026. It helps build the dated timeline above, with three limits:
- One row per cited violation, not per visit. Count a visit once by combining its license number and result date; otherwise a visit with eight violations looks like eight inspections.
- No score or letter-grade field. Rows carry a result code (such as HE_Pass, HE_Fail, HE_FailExt, HE_Filed or HE_Hearing), a violation description and a violation level shown as one, two or three asterisks. The posted letter still comes from the Mayor’s Food Court search and the grading rules above.
- Result codes aren’t defined on the dataset page. Rare codes such as HE_TSOP and HE_VolClos appear too. Ask Inspectional Services what a code means before describing it as a suspension or a closure.
Grouped by license and date, the 2025 rows describe about 12,400 results: 6,188 coded HE_Pass, 3,865 HE_Fail and 1,134 HE_FailExt, with smaller numbers of other codes. Those totals mix routine visits and reinspections, and they are our count of public rows, not a City statistic. They do show that a failing row is common in Boston’s records, which is one more reason to tie any letter grade to its own dated source.
Resolve a missing step without guessing current status
If the displayed grade and available reports do not line up, ask Boston Inspectional Services which dated inspection supplied the grade and how to obtain the missing report. Include the business name, exact address, dates you can see, and the specific gap. The City’s Mayor’s Food Court information page supplies current contact details.
That page also links a separate temporary-permit-suspension search with 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows. For a closure or reopening question, seek the dated action and subsequent record; neither an older suspension nor an A grade answers present operating status by itself. A grade is not a guarantee of current food safety.
For the separate question of whether a Massachusetts inspection report is itself an order, the report and correction-order guide explains what to check on that document. Knowing which grade was posted does not resolve what a particular order required.
Official sources checked September 29, 2026; Analyze Boston data counted October 20, 2026.