Real-time (almost) restaurant inspection reports

If a restaurant gets a poor health inspection, wouldn't you want to know about it right away?

That's what Philly.com's Sam Wood thought. The Philadelphia Health Department had been keeping its reports a secret for 30 days, and Sam's recent article got a lot of traction around the country. (The city's logic was to give restaurants and other facilities time to fix problems and be reinspected. Seldom, however, that was the case.)

On Monday, the department lifted the embargo.

Thanks to the stellar coding work of our colleague Michele Tranquilli, allowing the city's database to be "scraped" throughout the day, this information is available in real time.

To see the reports, click here early and often.