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Yelp Now Lists L.A. Restaurants' Health Letter Grades
(Photo by Tim Wang via the Creative Commons on Flickr)
If you were wondering just how disgusting your five-star or hole-in-the-wall restaurant is, now you can find out with the click of a button. Yelp is now showing you what sort of health grades your favorite L.A. eateries are making.
The L.A. County Department of Health announced today that not only can you now see on Yelp what letter grades these joints scored, but also any violations or corrections they've made as well, according to a statement. However, only letter grades dealt to restaurants after July 1, 2013 will show up on the review site; anything prior to that date can be found on the Public Health's website.
Yelp launched the programs for San Francisco and New York City in January this year. "While ratings and reviews are incredibly powerful ways to guide spending decisions, we're always looking for new ways to supplement the information to provide a better experience for consumers," Yelp's co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a statement.
The department has been grading restaurants and putting the placards in the storefront windows since 1997. It seems to have done some good as the county reported that the number of hospitalizations from food poisoning had dropped 13 percent from 1993 to 2000, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Food truck and hot dog vendor scores aren't listed on Yelp yet, but the county hopes to add those soon.
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