The popular Web site Yelp is going to post city Health Department letter grades along with its consumer-written restaurant reviews, officials told The Post yesterday.
Over the coming weeks, the grades, which many restaurant owners contend are arbitrary and unfair, will be automatically uploaded to the site, which boasts more than 70 million users nationwide.
The A, B, C, fail or “pending’ grades will go live on Yelp’s New York site within several weeks, said company spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose.
A similar grading policy will go online in San Francisco today, and is expected to be added to the Chicago and Philadelphia sites.
New York restaurant owners worry that the letter grades, which already must be posted prominently outside eateries, could confuse diners.
“You can have an A grade then fail an inspection, but while waiting for the tribunal keep posting an A — while someone will have a ‘grade pending’ [and] may actually be fighting to change a B to an A,” said Jeffrey Bank, CEO of the Alicart Restaurant Group which owns Carmine’s and Virgil’s Real Barbecue.
“It’s not as simple as A, B and C,” he added.
His three New York City locations all have A’s.
Once the system is fully integrated, a Yelp user will be able to view details of a restaurant’s inspection history without having to navigate to the Health Department’s own Web site.
That was little comfort for the New York Restaurant Association, which has been objecting to the letter-grade system since it was established in July 2010.
“Online information on health inspections is often out of date or has nothing to do with food safety,” said association spokesman Andrew Moesel.
City Health Department spokeswoman Jean Weinberg said, “We’re pleased that Yelp is making our grades available to even more consumers via their Web site, and encourage other companies to use our data by visiting NYC’s open data site.”