Chicago is the third largest city in the US, counting about 2.7 million inhabitants. It is surrounded by a large metropolitan area with a total of 10 million people, largely surpassing the whole population of Switzerland. In addition, the Chicagoans, as the residents are called, welcome an impressive 58 million tourists each year that are willing to visit the Windy City located on the shores of Lake Michigan. It is not surprising that such a megacity also offers an incredibly varied and rich food scene with cuisine styles from every corner of the world. An in-depth analysis of Yelp reviews and food inspection results from the Chicago Department of Public Health’s Food Protection Program will help you make your food choice! This analysis takes into account 8'647 food establishments in the city. Since Chicago has 77 different neighbourhoods, also known as community areas, you may also want to choose your destination based on the analysis of crime rates in each of these areas. Certain destinations are better suited for families, and allow a better feeling of safety.
Chicago Loop is well-known for the Chicago Riverwalk, a pedestrian path with restaurants beside the Chicago River, the Millennium Park, with the iconic Cloud Gate (or “The Bean”), historic architecture sprinkled within the modern and high-rise buildings, boat tours, incredible dining ranging from German taverns, Italian restaurants to breakfast spots, shopping along State Street, and a theatre district with the Auditorium Theatre, Broadway in Chicago, Goodman Theatre, and many more.
Establishments have a varying risk to public health, and thus inspections occur more or less frequently depending on their risk category. The risk category of an establishment will depend on the selling of risky foods, compliance history of the establishment, and the facility type. Risk 1 establishments are inspected at least twice per calendar year (accounting for 73% of establishments); Risk 2 establishments are inspected at least once per calendar year (23%); and Risk 3 establishments are inspected every two years (3.7%).
Food Inspections can be of several types, for instance:
By the means of a Health Code Violations, which is a list containing dozens of potential health hazards present in a food establishment, the inspection can lead to a pass, pass with conditions, or fail result. The Health Code Violations before the 1st of July 2018 were categorized into critical, serious, and minor violations:
If an inspection only leads to the discovery of minor violations or none, the result is a pass. However, if there are serious or critical violations, but these are corrected during inspection, this leads to a pass with conditions. Otherwise, this leads to the failure of the inspection, which must be corrected for as desired by the Department of Public Health.
As of the 1st of July 2018, the number of violations on the list increased from 45 to 63 to better account for food safety.
To get a better feeling about the inspection results of Chicago’s food establishments since 2010, you can click start on the animated plot. Afterwards, you can get more information on each inspection by clicking on the dots. By moving the "fps" sliding bar, you can change the speed by altering the number of frames per second.
If you paid close attention, you might have detected the distinct change in inspection scores happening in summer 2018. This is due to a change in the Health Code Violations. This change led to an increase in the number of possible violations during an inspection. Consequently, the number of critical/serious violations increased, and thus the number of inspection results with pass with conditions increased.
Evidently, such an animated plot does not give a clear quantitative idea about the changes in the results and inspection types that occured over the past 10 years. To get a better idea of the evolution of the ratio of pass results and fail results in a year, click on the "Inspection results" tab below. You can also have a look at the "Inspection types" to see if the motives of inspection have changed over time.
The plot shows the evolution of the ratio of inspection results per year. Again, one can see a clear change happening in 2018. Apart from this change in the Health Code Violation, the ratios remain stable over time. Clicking on the legend items on the right will allow you to inspect the individual changes in greater detail.
To evaluate the performance of each individual establishment with respect to their inspection results, a score will be obtained from the list of violations that were committed. The serious or critical violations could lead to repercussions on the health of the client, however the minor violations do not affect the result of an inspection as defined by the Department of Public Health. Indeed, both critical and serious violations can lead to failure, and thus these are used as basis for the development of a Food Inspection Score. The final Food Inspection Score reflects the general health safety of the establishment and ranges from 0-10. Similarly to Yelp, a bigger score means a better performance.
When thinking about the food the United States offers, many Europeans will think of large fast food chains such as Burger King, McDonald’s or Starbucks. Analyzing the nine largest food chains established in Chicago, we can see that not all chains treat the food safety with the same degree of seriousness. To compare the proportion of different inspection results obtained by these different fast food chains since 2010, click on the "Chain results" tab. To see the evolution of the failure rate in time for each food chain, click on the tab "Chain evolution".
Looking at the normalized cumulative failure rate over the years, some very interesting patterns emerge. Again, Papa John’s Pizza, which opened its first businesses in 2010 in Chicago, performs the worst. Other well-established chains such as McDonald’s or Subway have quite stable inspection outcomes over the years, which can be attributed to their highly standardized procedures for each branch.
Yelp.com is a website that helps people find great local businesses such as restaurants based on customer reviews. Each establishment has a page where visitors can write comments and add a general score reflecting their experience. The same restaurants that were previously analyzed with the Chicago Food Inspection results are analyzed below with their Yelp score. A score on Yelp ranges from 1-5, where 1 is the lowest grade and 5 the highest.
The dual map below shows the rating of the 100 restaurants with the most reviews on the left, and the score of the 100 restaurants with the least reviews on the right. Each establishment is a pin on the map (with a restaurant symbol) and their color reflects the score they have on Yelp.
Interestingly, it can be noted that the restaurants with the most reviews have better ratings (a grade of 3 or higher) than the restaurants with less reviews. Also, the establishment with more reviews are located much closer to the city-center. Thus, the popularity and success of a restaurant seems to be reflected by the number of reviews, and its proximity to the city-center.
To delve deeper into our analysis, we can compare the results of the Food Inspection scores with the Yelp ratings. One could expect that a low Food Inspection Score would also lead to a low Yelp rating, since customers would likely be prone to leaving a unhappy review if they fear the food is not safe. Surprisingly these two scores are slightly negatively correlated. Several reasons can be put forward to try and explain this result.
Firstly, the two scores have very different criteria. For the Yelp rating, the customers are mostly judging the taste of the food, the general atmosphere and the service of the restaurant. On the other hand, for the Food Inspection Score, the establishment is rated on its food safety, and thus purely based on ensuring food safety and sanitation without taking into account the general experience that a customer could have at the restaurant. Indeed, a customer may have a very pleasant experience in a restaurant despite the fact that the sanitation behind the kitchen door may not be perfect, as long as they do not get sick from food-poisoning or notice something suspect about the hygiene of the food service.
In addition, the Yelp rating is a subjective score that could be prone to the herding effect: the new reviews from customers will be influenced by the reviews and ratings of the previous customers. The Food Inspection Score, however, is not prone to this effect, and remains an objective measure of the establishment and its food safety by following a strict Health Violation Code.
To try and directly explain the slightly negative correlation between these two scores, one can note that, as seen previously, the better rated restaurants on Yelp are closer to the city-center and more popular. Thus, the busier and more popular establishments have to keep up with a faster food service and could face more difficulties maintaining good hygiene. Violations such as: “Food-contact surfaces: cleaned & sanitized”, and “Proper cooking time & temperatures” could be compromised in a busy restaurant, where serving quickly is a priority. The restaurant may also feel less of a requirement to be so strict with food safety since they are guaranteed customers in any case, and feel that there may not be much impact on their profit even if their food inspection results do not excel.
Chicago unfortunately does not only offer great food, but also suffers from a high criminality rate. Nevertheless, the density of crimes per square kilometer in each community area varies greatly as can be seen in the map on the left. With almost 2’000 reported crimes in 2019 (until end of October), the popular Chicago Loop area has the highest overall crime density. It is however typical that the crime density is higher in the city centre as lots of people live, work and spend time in a relatively condensed area. Looking at the absolute numbers, it is however Austin, which has the lead with a total of 11’691 reported crimes (compared to 8’292 in Loop).
You can also use the search bar (after clicking on the magnifying glass symbol) to search the Community Area you are interested in. Select the Community Area of interest in the dropdown menu, and the map will automatically zoom on a desired neighborhood.
Just looking at the total number of crimes does not inform us where the most violent crimes, such as homicide and kidnapping, happen and which areas are really dangerous to visit. Indeed, when focusing on the violent crimes density (km2) per community area, the picture changes quite a bit: the city centre around the Loop area suffers less from very high violent crime rates, indicating that petty crime is disproportionately high in this area. On the other hand, community areas known to experience long-term socio-economic problems in the West Side, such as Garfield Park, Lawndale and Austin, report higher violent crime rates. Similarly, some community areas in the South Side struggle with lots of cases involving violent crimes.
One might not only be interested in the crimes of 2019 but the changes in the community areas over time in terms of criminal safety. The map below showcases the evolution of the crime density (km2) per community area over the years from 2010 to 2018. We can observe that many areas shift to from very light colors (around the long-term average crime density) to darker blue-ish colors, indicating a reduction in overall crimes. At the same time, it is stunning to see how criminality increases gradually over time from 2015 to 2018 in the city center. This is consistent with the results observed before that the city center is currently the area with the highest overall crime density!
Are you looking for a good recommendation to eat some seafood with your family in Chicago? Or simply looking for a place to have coffee with a friend? The map below will guide you in your choice, whilst allowing you to avoid food-poisoning and dangerous neighbourhoods.
The slidebar below allows you to interactively choose the Yelp rating the restaurant must have (1 or above, 2 or above, and so on). Only restaurants that reach this condition will appear on the map. In order to have the restaurants begin to appear on the map, you can now choose the types of restaurant foods you are interested in by hovering on the layer symbol. A long list of different types of foods (Fast foods, Italian, Sweet, etc.) will appear, and by ticking the food type, the desired restaurants will pop-up on the map. Large bubbles with numbers representing the number of restaurants with that food category in the area will appear, and by zooming in you can get a better look at the different types of restaurants. Indeed, by hovering on a unique restaurant, its name will appear. Then if you click on the restaurant pin, the Yelp rating along with the Food Inspection Score of the establishment will be presented. The Food Inspection Score gives you an idea of how food-safe the establishment is. A high Food Inspection Score (max. 10) means the best safety, and low (min. 0) is maybe an establishment that you could consider skipping if you don’t want to get sick...
If you want to have an even safer experience in Chicago, not only in terms of the food safety, but also in terms of general safety, we’ve got you covered! The list containing the food categories also contains two supplementary categories named: ‘Community areas crime’, and ‘Community areas names’. By ticking the former, the different communities of Chicago will be colored in different shades of green, in order to represent the crime density of each of the areas. For additional information on the community areas, the ‘Community areas names’ option will display the name of the community area when the mouse hovers above it.
You can also use the search bar (after clicking on the magnifying glass symbol) to search the Community Area you are interested in. Select the Community Area of interest in the dropdown menu, and the map will automatically zoom onto the desired neighborhood.