LA County Health Inspection: What Inspectors Check, In Order
You start at 100 points. Everything after that is subtraction.
That's the whole LA County grading system, and understanding how the subtraction works tells you exactly where to spend your attention.
Grade recovery is a standing part of our Los Angeles restaurant consulting, because a B costs more than most owners think.
The grades
A — 90 to 100 points. "Generally superior in food handling practices and overall food facility maintenance."
B — 80 to 89. "Generally good."
C — 70 to 79. "Generally acceptable."
Below 70 — no letter at all. You get a score card showing your actual numerical score, and it stays in the window until your next routine inspection.
That last one is the real penalty. A C is a letter most customers don't parse. A card reading "63" in the window is a number anyone can read.
The gap between an A and a B is ten points. That sounds like a lot until you see what things cost.
What each violation costs
Major violations: 4 points each. These are the critical risk factors — the things that actually make people sick. Improper holding temperatures. Inadequate sanitation. Bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food.
Two or more majors: an extra 3 points. In the county's own words, if two or more major critical risk violations are marked, Category #53 — Multiple Major Critical Violations / Increased Risk to Public Health is marked and a further three points come off. Two majors isn't 8 points. It's 11.
A major that suspends your permit: an additional 7 points, for 11 total on that one violation. No water, sewage backup, vermin infestation. You also close.
One useful wrinkle: the extra 3-point multiple-major penalty does not stack on top when the closure is for no water, sewage, or vermin. Small mercy in a very bad day.
Minor violations: 2 points each. Less immediate risks that still sit in critical tracking — food debris on a slicer, procedural gaps.
Good Retail Practices: 1 point each. General maintenance and facility upkeep. A burned-out bulb over the prep line. Clutter. Peeling paint.
Now do the arithmetic on your own restaurant
Three majors during a busy Friday inspection: 12 points, plus the 3-point multiple-major penalty. That's 15. You have a B, before a single minor or GRP is counted.
Meanwhile, ten separate Good Retail Practice items — genuinely cosmetic things, none of which will ever make anyone ill — cost you 10 points and take you to exactly 90. Still an A, barely.
The lesson is blunt: majors are the whole game. A restaurant that is spotless but holds food at the wrong temperature scores worse than a slightly scruffy one that nails its temps.
One thing to check before you read any further
LA County inspects most of the county — but Pasadena, Long Beach and Vernon run their own health departments. If you're in one of those three, the grading and the rules come from your city, not the county. Everything below is LA County.
The sequence an inspection follows
Inspections are unannounced, and while no two inspectors work identically, the shape is consistent:
1. The walk-in and the reach-ins, first. Temperatures are the highest-value thing on the sheet and the easiest to verify. Expect a probe thermometer in the cold food within the first few minutes.
2. Hot holding. Steam table, soups, held proteins. Same logic.
3. Handwashing. Are the sinks accessible, stocked with soap and towels, and at temperature? A handwash sink blocked by a stack of cambros is a classic and entirely avoidable finding.
4. Cross-contamination paths. Raw over ready-to-eat in the walk-in. Cutting board and utensil separation. Where thawing happens.
5. Employee practices, watched not asked. Bare-hand contact. Glove changes. Whether someone washed after handling raw chicken. This is observed while you're being asked about something else.
6. Chemical storage and labeling. Sanitizer concentration. Chemicals stored above or beside food.
7. Documentation. Food handler cards. Certified food protection manager. Cooling and temperature logs, if you keep them.
8. The facility itself. Floors, walls, ceilings, lighting, ventilation, pest evidence. This is where the 1-pointers accumulate.
The five things that actually cost restaurants their A
In our experience walking LA kitchens, the same handful of findings come up again and again:
Cold holding above 41°F, almost always in an overloaded prep-top rail during service
Cooling done wrong — a deep container of soup or braise put in the walk-in hot and covered
A blocked or unstocked handwash sink, especially at the dish station
Raw protein stored above ready-to-eat, usually the result of a delivery put away in a hurry
Sanitizer at the wrong concentration, because the bucket was made at 9am and never remade
Not one of those requires money to fix. All five require a written procedure and someone checking.
The thing to do before your next inspection
Walk your own kitchen at 7pm on your busiest night — not at 10am when it's clean — with a probe thermometer and the eight-step sequence above.
Whatever you find at 7pm on a Friday is what the inspector will find.
Making it a system, not a scramble
The restaurants that hold an A aren't the ones that clean hard before an inspection. They're the ones running daily temperature logs, cooling logs, sanitizer checks and a line check that somebody signs.
Our Restaurant Operations Toolkit includes those logs and checklists alongside the food cost, prime cost, labor and break-even calculators — 19 editable templates. The inspection side of it costs you about four minutes a shift and turns your grade from a result into a process. Instant download.
Want your logs and line check reviewed before your next inspection? Book a free 20-minute consult.
Grade bands and point values above are taken from the LA County Department of Public Health's published Retail Food Inspection Guide and its grading and posting requirements, checked August 2026. The inspection sequence is our own experience of how inspections typically run, not an official order.
