Cooked started with one Chinese restaurant in Astoria

I built Cooked because of one Chinese restaurant in Astoria, Queens.

I loved Malala Chinese. The food was unusually spicy, especially the crispy chicken, and I ordered it often. The problem was that its New York City health grade seemed to live permanently somewhere between B, C, and “Grade Pending.” On several walks past the restaurant, I also saw the posted card partly obscured by other things in the window.

I kept eating there for a while. I also kept checking.

When the Astoria location changed from Malala Chinese to Nice Day Chinese, the old inspection record no longer answered the question I had. I wanted to know when the new establishment would receive its first official grade. That meant repeatedly finding the city website, searching the database, and checking whether anything had changed.

Eventually the obvious question arrived: why was I doing this by hand?

The first version watched one restaurant

The first thing I built was not a citywide map or a camera feature. It was an alert for that one address. If New York published a new inspection or grade, I wanted to know without remembering to search for it.

Once that worked, the larger version became hard to ignore. The city already published the records. They were just awkward to use at the moment they mattered: standing outside a restaurant, choosing between two spots on a block, or wondering whether a place you saved had finally been re-inspected.

That one alert became Cooked.

Making ten grading systems tell the truth together

Cooked now combines official restaurant-inspection data across ten US and UK cities. You can search by name, browse a map, save a restaurant for updates, or point your camera down the street and see nearby grades over the storefronts.

The camera view is not computer vision. Your phone supplies its location and direction; Cooked uses those signals to place nearby restaurants in the view. No camera image is uploaded or analyzed.

The harder problem was the data. New York uses letters. Chicago uses Pass, Pass with Conditions, and Fail. Seattle and King County use placard words. Austin publishes a numerical score. The UK uses a food hygiene rating from 0 to 5, where 5 is best.

Cooked preserves whatever the authority actually issued, then adds a smaller comparison layer: clean, mid, or cooked. The original grade never disappears behind that translation.

There is one rule I care about especially: Cooked does not invent a grade that the authority has not posted. In New York, a scored inspection can legitimately remain Grade Pending until a later inspection settles the letter. Turning that score into an unofficial C might look decisive, but it would contradict the city. Cooked shows the uncertainty instead.

What it became

As of August 2026, Cooked covers roughly 255,000 restaurants and close to one million inspections. The official sources are refreshed daily, with reconciliation runs to catch records that changed or arrived late.

The app is free on iOS and Android. There is no account, advertising, or paywall. Saved restaurants remain on your device.

It is still, in a sense, the alert I wanted for one restaurant in Astoria. It just watches a much larger block now.

If a record looks wrong, or if the wording makes an official result sound more certain than it is, please say so. The early Astoria feedback caught real problems in the data handling, map behavior, filters, and copy. That kind of correction is part of how Cooked gets better.

See how Cooked handles official inspection data, or check the current Nice Day Chinese record.

Corrections and updates

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