Rating restaurants: How clean is your favorite eatery?

Rats and bugs infesting restaurants. Sick employees handling food. Dirty pans and utensils used in preparation. Cold foods not kept cold enough, nor hot foods hot enough. Cooks who don't wash their hands. Serving contaminated food.

Those are some of what health inspectors consider "critical violations," or the infractions most likely to contribute to food-borne illness if not corrected quickly. Inspectors say that finding even one critical violation may be too many.

But Salt Lake Valley Health Department restaurant inspectors found a whopping 27,168 of them during 2003 and 2004 (plus another 67,135 lesser infractions).

Deseret Morning News graphic Violations per inspection at S.L. County food establishments Requires Adobe Acrobat.

They found that number even though inspectors visit most food establishments only once or twice a year. They are admittedly too short-handed to inspect up to the four times a year that guidelines urge for some restaurant types.

Inspectors found an average of five critical violations every time they examined a full-service restaurant. At fast-food restaurants, they found an average of almost three. Other food-serving establishments, from nursing homes to bars, schools, theater snack bars and more, tended to average one or two critical violations each.

That's according to a computer-assisted analysis of electronic records for nearly 10,000 inspections during 2003 and 2004. The data were obtained by the Deseret Morning News through a state open records law request.

The analysis shows which restaurants had the most violations per inspection and the fewest, with 25 establishments averaging 13 or more critical violations per inspection, while 30 had perfect scores with no violations of any kind during the two years.

It shows which fast-food chains had the best and worst inspection scores (Starbucks had the best overall and Hogi Yogi the lowest). Reports also allowed comparisons among different types of ethnic food establishments. (Indian restaurants had the best scores, and Vietnamese the lowest.)

The health department does not routinely make such inspection data public, so few consumers are likely to have any idea of how clean — or dirty — the restaurants they visit are. In fact, even if residents report that a restaurant's food may have made them sick, the health department will not share results of investigations with them unless they file a formal request under the Government Records Access Management Act.

Even so, inspectors and industry spokesmen say the lion's share of restaurants do a good job, are safe and tend to quickly try to address any problems that inspectors find.

Serious violations?