Austin Restaurants with the Best Health Scores

How this list is built, in full

1. Ask for the 400 most recently filed inspection records that carry map coordinates, from Austin Public Health (Austin Open Data, dataset ecmv-9xxi). We got 400 back this time. These are inspections, not restaurants: a kitchen inspected twice in the window files two records, and this table holds far more records than facilities.
2. Collapse them to one row per facility, keeping each facility’s most recent inspection — its current published score. That left 399 distinct facilities this time, and it is why no kitchen can appear twice below.
3. Keep the ones scoring 90 or above out of 100.
4. Keep only Austin addresses, and drop the rows Austin Public Health prefixes with a jurisdiction code (“BC -” Bee Caves, “PF -” Pflugerville, “LW -” Lakeway). The dataset covers the county; this page does not.
5. Drop national chains by name, and drop the kitchens that are not restaurants — school cafeterias, hospitals, care homes, church halls, hotel breakfast rooms, grocery and warehouse canteens. The dataset inspects all of them and they score very well.
6. Sort by score; where scores tie, the more recent inspection goes first. Show the top 20 — 71 facilities qualified this time.

What that means in practice. This is a recency window, not a citywide ranking: a restaurant inspected two months ago cannot appear here however well it scored. The query also returns only rows that have been geocoded, so an unknown number of otherwise-qualifying restaurants are invisible for a reason that has nothing to do with their kitchen. And a hygiene score is not a review — 100 means clean, not good. “Excellent” and “Very Good” are our plain-English labels; the city publishes the number and no label at all.

The limit of steps 3 and 4. This dataset does not publish a facility-type field, so “is this a restaurant?” is answered here by matching words in the business name. That works on the obvious cases and will occasionally get one wrong in both directions — letting a canteen through, or excluding a restaurant whose name happens to contain one of our words. We would rather tell you the rule than imply a precision the data cannot support. To look up a specific business without any of our filtering, use the full inspection search.