About RatingCafe, the honest UK hygiene directory
RatingCafe surfaces the FSA hygiene rating of every UK restaurant, pub, takeaway and cafe. Public data, refreshed daily. No paid placements, no opinion.
Last fact-checked: · Reviewed by James Thornton
Why this site exists
Every food business in the United Kingdom has a Food Standards Agency hygiene rating. The data has been public open data for years. And yet, if you walk past a dodgy takeaway on a Tuesday night, you have no easy way to check its score before the kebab hits your plate.
The window sticker scheme was meant to solve that. It didn’t. In England, displaying the rating is voluntary, and predictably, the venues that got a 0 or a 1 don’t display it.
We built RatingCafe to close that gap. No vote-rigging, no paid placements, no opinion editorial masquerading as ratings. Just the FSA’s own data, surfaced honestly and made searchable.
Editorial
All written content is edited by James Thornton, an editorial byline for our food safety and regulation beat, 9 years of UK coverage. Our editorial process separates data (FSA-sourced, never modified) from analysis (our own, clearly labelled). Venue pages use the FSA’s own published scores without modification; only editorial passages are written.
Sources we work from every day: the Food Standards Agency, FSA open-data endpoint, the UK Open Government Licence v3.0, the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and the FSS (Food Standards Scotland) for the FHIS scheme.
What’s next
- Phase 1 (live), UK venue search, city pages, chain analysis, worst-rated lists.
- Phase 2 (coming), historical inspection trends, hygiene score evolution graphs, owner notification for corrections.
- Phase 3 (later), Europe expansion, starting with France, Germany and Ireland.
Contact
General: hello@ratingcafe.cafe
Press: same address, put PRESS in the subject line.