Cooked?How Seattle restaurant inspection ratings work
Seattle restaurant inspection ratings explained in plain English: the official scale, what each result means, and how Cooked maps it to clean, mid or cooked.
The short version
clean = Excellent/Good, mid = Okay, cooked = Needs To Improve — King County’s placard ratings.
| Official result | What it means | Cooked comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent or Good | Strong placard rating | clean |
| Okay | Middle placard rating | mid |
| Needs To Improve | Weak placard rating | cooked |
| Not Rated | Not enough rating history | shown separately |
How Seattle actually grades restaurants
Public Health — Seattle & King County posts a word, not a letter: Excellent, Good, Okay, or Needs To Improve. The rating is deliberately not a snapshot — it averages the establishment’s recent routine inspections, so one bad day does not sink a consistently clean kitchen and one good day does not rescue a bad one. Inspectors score violations in red points for things that directly cause foodborne illness and blue points for everything else; around 45 red points triggers a mandatory re-inspection. Newly opened or recently changed spots can show as Not Rated until enough inspections accumulate.
What the public record can tell you
Public Health — Seattle & King County also publishes itemized findings, so Cooked can show the issues recorded on a particular inspection. The dated result is useful evidence about what an inspector observed, but it is not a promise about every meal served before or after that visit. Ratings can also reach the public days or weeks after the inspection itself, so Cooked displays the authority’s inspection date rather than pretending the record arrived in real time.
Why Cooked adds a traffic light
The clean, mid and cooked labels are a comparison layer, not replacement grades. The official rating remains visible everywhere. That makes it possible to compare cities without suggesting that unlike systems are identical—and keeps pending, unrated and unavailable information separate from a failing result.
Corrections and updates
Published August 8, 2026. No corrections recorded.