New York City is world famous for its restaurant scene, and is equally infamous for its rat population. With one of the strictest and most transparent health code systems, I wanted to see if there was a correlation between reported sightings of rats and restaurant letter grades.
I pulled data for each subject from NYC Open Data. In 2019, there were a total of 23,603 inspections of food establishments across the 5 boroughs that ranged from cafes to fine dining to quick casual. Even limiting the data to just the borough of Manhattan, there were still 9,529 items in the data set.
I further limited down the data to by date and removal of establishments pending grades. Finally, I landed on a population of 45 establishments (15 of each grade), selected randomly via Excel. I then created a quarter-mile radius around each restaurant in the sample population to focus the thousands of rat reports spanning September through October in 2019.
I used the 1980's pulp novel, The Rats by James Herbert as inspiration for the colour palette and early 80's vibe of the project.
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info@jes.fyi
