How restaurant inspections work in Texas
Who inspects Texas's restaurants, how results are graded, and how to read them on CleanPlate.
Texas delegates food inspection to cities and counties, and they've made gloriously different choices — the state is a tour of every grading philosophy in America. CleanPlate covers nine Texas jurisdictions including the complete Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Austin, and San Antonio's neighbors.
Who does the inspecting
Each city or county health department inspects its own territory under the Texas Food Establishment Rules: Austin Public Health, the City of Dallas, the City of Fort Worth, Tarrant County Public Health (covering the mid-cities), Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Arlington, and New Braunfels each run their own program.
How results are graded
Here's where it gets interesting. Austin, Arlington, Dallas, and Plano score 0–100 where higher is better. Fort Worth, Frisco, and McKinney count demerits — 0 is a perfect kitchen, and points accumulate per violation. Tarrant County uses both systems side by side depending on inspection type. CleanPlate detects each city's convention (and each Tarrant inspection's), converts demerit counts so higher is always better on our scale, and maps totals to letter equivalents — so a Fort Worth page and an Austin page read the same way despite opposite underlying arithmetic.
Reading it on CleanPlate
Every Texas restaurant page on CleanPlate shows the establishment's current standing, its full inspection history with dates, and a link to the official agency behind the record. Grades are shown exactly as reported; where the source publishes no summary grade, the derived status is labeled as derived. Establishments with no inspection in over two years are treated as likely closed and excluded from search.