BY YAN WU
There are nearly 100 registered food establishments in East Boston. As East Boston's population is ethnically diverse, the food services are also diversified.
The location of food stores and food service places are associated with neighborhood characteristics, according to a research by the University of North Carolina.
Besides fantastic waterfront views and the sound of Boeings flying into Logan Airport, East Boston also has a high reputation of cuisines diversity, family-run restaurants, and tantalizing cheap eats.
Among all the neighborhoods, Maverick Square, once the most crime-ridden in the neighborhood, has become a place with the most restaurants. Here is a 360-degree look at the popular restaurants around Maverick Square.
Drag the video or put your phone in a Google cardboard to enjoy the 360 view. The white bubbles labeled basic price and rating information of each restaurant.
This video combined yelp data with the 360 view of several restaurants at Maverick Square. So you can easily pick one.
However, Yelp can only tell you what other customers have seen and felt. If you care more about food sanitation, you may want to check violation records of restaurants.
There are nearly 1,000 food establishment violations last year.
More than 50 kinds of food related violations detected in more than 100 food establishments in East Boston, inclucing restaurants, bars, cafe, and convenient stores.
Reasons for inspections vary, including: food protection, wiping cloths clean sanitize, improper maintenance, etc.
The Mayor's Food Court rates violations of food service establishments as either a Foodborne Illness Risk Factor Critical Violation, a Critical Violation, or a Non-Critical Violation. Accordingly, we labeled them as most serious, somewhat serious, and least serious.
Here is 360-degree look at the popular restaurants around Chelsea Street, another spot with various food services. Hover over white icons to see violation records in 2017 of each restaurants.
Chelsea Street. Hover on the white icon to get violation information of each restaurants.
The most commonly cared critical violations can be grouped as three categories:
Food
Spoilage unsafe food, cold holding, hot holding, food utensil storage, food protection.
Management
PIC (Person In Charge) knowledge, PIC performing duties, consumer advisories, location accessible
Sanitation
Separation/sanitizer criteria, food contact surfaces clean, insects rodents animals, toxic items
Below mapped the restaurants, cafes and bars yelp listed. Data is requested using foursquare API and the Boston Food Inspectionsdataset.
Hover on each dots to see its Yelp ratings.
Click on each dots to reveal its food violations last year.
Note: Because the yelp dataset and food inspections dataset do not share same identifications, some violations data may be missing on this map.
From the map above, we could see restaurants around Maverick square and Chelsea Street has better ratings at Yelp.
To reveal more about all the food service at East Boston, a food violation map was created using all the food inspections data.
Besides restaurants, cafes and bars, this map includes other food service like convenient stores, liquors stores, etc.
From the map below, we can see that food establishments at Maverick square and Chelsea Street do not have less food violations though their yelp ratings are overall higher than other places in East Boston. Hover on each dots to learn more.
Let's meet a few establishments that absolutely not have any food violation records last year. Hover over the circles to get their address.