About Dodgy Dinners

Dodgy Dinners is a simple idea. Every restaurant, pub, café and takeaway in the country gets inspected for food hygiene, and the result is public. Trouble is, that information is scattered across council records and the official register, which is great if you know exactly what you are looking for and less great if you are stood outside a chippy wondering whether to risk it.

So we gathered it all up. Type in a name, or share your location, and you get the official 0 to 5 hygiene score in a couple of seconds, plus the date it was last inspected and what each part of the score actually means. No sign-up, no faff.

Where the data comes from

Every rating on this site comes straight from the Food Standards Agency, the government body responsible for food safety across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We pull their open data regularly so the scores you see match the official register. We do not set the ratings, change them, or take payment to bump anyone up. We just make them easier to find. The data is used under the Open Government Licence.

A rating is about safety, not taste

One thing worth saying plainly: a hygiene rating is not a review. It does not tell you whether the food is delicious or the staff are lovely. It scores how well a business manages food safety: how it handles and stores food, the state of the premises, and how confident inspectors are that good habits will stick. A greasy spoon you adore can still score top marks, and a fancy place can slip up. If you want the detail, we explain exactly how food hygiene ratings work.

Closed or renamed places

Businesses come and go. When a place drops out of the official register we keep its page up but flag it as possibly closed or renamed, so an old bookmark or search result still lands somewhere useful rather than a dead end.