Cooked?
Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge
- ratingRated Excellent
- inspection score10 pts
- critical violations1
- last inspectedMay 22, 2025
- address226 1St Ave S, Kent 98032
Is Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge clean?
Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge is currently Rated Excellent from Public Health — Seattle & King County, from an inspection on May 22, 2025. Inspectors wrote up 1 critical violation — the kind most directly linked to foodborne illness. On Cooked's ladder that reads clean 😇.
What did inspectors find at Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge?
These are the violations recorded at the most recent inspection on May 22, 2025, in plain English, with the city's own wording underneath.
- 🍴utensils stored sketchy4200 - Food-contact surfaces maintained, cleaned, sanitized
- 🧊cold food not cold enoughcritical2120 - Proper cold holding temperatures; between 42 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit (F) (6 to 7 degrees Celsius (C))
When was Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge last inspected?
Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge has 7 inspections on record going back to May 12, 2021, averaging 5 points.
| date | result | score |
|---|---|---|
| May 22, 2025 | Rated Excellent | 10 pts |
| November 8, 2024 | Rated Excellent | 5 pts |
| April 17, 2024 | Rated Excellent | 10 pts |
| November 15, 2023 | Rated Excellent | 0 pts |
| April 12, 2023 | Rated Excellent | 7 pts |
| April 14, 2022 | Rated Excellent | 0 pts |
| May 12, 2021 | Rated Excellent | 0 pts |
Rafiki Restaurant & Lounge vs Kent
Kent runs 78% clean across 360 tracked restaurants — 281 clean, 74 mid, 5 cooked.
Against the 360 spots Cooked tracks in Kent, this one comes out cleaner than 26% of them.
Other spots in Kent
How Seattle 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.
Source: Public Health — Seattle & King County via King County Open Data. Cooked refreshes this data daily — this listing's most recent inspection is dated May 22, 2025. Inspection results describe one moment in a kitchen's life, not a permanent verdict.