The violations inspectors cite most
The same handful of issues shows up in kitchen after kitchen, coast to coast. Here's the repeat-offender list.
Read enough inspection reports — CleanPlate processes hundreds of thousands of them — and the same violations appear again and again, in city after city, regardless of cuisine or price point.
The perennials
Cold holding temperatures. The single most-cited serious violation almost everywhere: food in the danger zone above 41°F because a cooler is overloaded, its door gasket leaks, or prep containers sat out too long.
Handwashing and hand sink access. Either employees observed not washing when required, or the hand sink is blocked, missing soap, or being used as a dump sink. Inspectors treat this severely because hands are the most common contamination vector.
Cross-contamination in storage. Raw chicken over the salad greens is the textbook citation — raw animal products must store below and away from ready-to-eat food.
Sanitizer concentration. The dish machine or wiping-cloth bucket testing too weak (or absent). Cheap to fix, endlessly cited.
Date marking. Ready-to-eat food held over 24 hours must be dated so it's discarded in time; missing labels are among the most common paperwork-adjacent citations.
Facility upkeep. The non-critical long tail — floors, walls, ceilings, lighting, screens — that fills the bottom of most reports without saying much about food safety.
See your own city's pattern
For cities where the source publishes full violation text at scale, CleanPlate builds a live “most common violations” breakdown from each establishment's latest inspection — the local version of this list, computed from the official record. You'll find it linked from those city pages.