Wilkes County Environmental Health Services is pleased to offer an online service to our community. In addition to viewing the final inspection grades for area restaurants, the community can view all inspection results. This includes child care centers, tattoo parlors, nursing homes, and of course restaurants. We are continuing to work with this new system to improve the availability of data to the public.

Procedure to View Inspections

1. Once you are on the Restaurant Inspections search site, type in the name of the establishment in the search field "Establishment Name Starting With."
2. Then, click the "Start Search" button.
3. Now click the "Inspections" button. You are now viewing the inspection page for that facility.
4. You may now click on the "Violations" button to view non-compliant items found during the inspection.
5.  From this point, if you would like to view another establishment inspection, click on the "Return to Inspections" button, then click on the "Return to Premises Lookup" button, and then click on the "Clear Search" button.
6. You are now ready to begin a new search by following the procedures beginning with typing in the name of the establishment in the search field "Establishment Name Starting With."

Results

Results posted after July 1, 2008 are available. Inspections posted prior to that date can be requested from our offices. Call 336-651-7530 for more information.

Restaurant Grades

The Food and Drug Administration has determined what types of mistakes people make in preparing food that could lead to transmitting disease. Restaurant inspections are based on those risks. Here are a few examples:

• Cutting raw meat on the same cutting board as the salad without cleaning the board first can pass germs that would be killed while cooking the chicken but won't be killed on uncooked salad
• Employees must be able to wash and dry their hands after using the restroom or handling raw meat or garbage. If the supplies (soap, paper towels) are not there, the employees are probably not washing their hands and could spread disease
• If foods are not kept at low temperatures for storage or high temperatures for serving, germs can grow on them very rapidly

General dirt and grime may take off a point or two, but the low scores come from problems that could allow disease-causing germs to get into the public's food.

Change to Cards

Public Health has moved away from blue A cards, green B cards and red C cards to a black and white card with the grade and score written in 1.5 inch size. This is so that people who want to see only the grade can still see it, but those who want to know more specifically what the grade is can also see it without having to squint. The number grade is just larger and the letter grade is moved over. The inspections are no different.

North Carolina Sanitation Rules

The North Carolina rules governing the sanitation of restaurants and other food handling establishments provide for a numerical value to be assigned to establishments as a result of quarterly inspection. These values have a corresponding letter grade. As stated in section 0.2606 of these rules, "(a) The sanitation grading of all restaurants, food stands, and drink stands, shall be based on a system of scoring as follows: