About Lost in Ontario

Toronto publishes an inspection result for every food premises in the city — 117,120 records and counting. Almost nobody sees them. The data sits in an open-data portal in a format built for analysts, and the directories most people actually use do not surface it at all.

That is the gap this fills. Not another listings site with star ratings, but the same restaurants with a fact attached that you currently have to go looking for.

The second reason is coverage of the things other directories treat as afterthoughts: which places are independent rather than chains, which have step-free access, and how you actually get there on the TTC.

It is not a review site. There are no ratings, no user reviews, and no sponsored placements — nothing here can be paid for.

It is not a substitute for DineSafe. The City is the authoritative source and updates daily; we reproduce its findings and link back to it on every page.

And it does not pretend to certainty it lacks. Where a field is unknown it says so. Where a health record cannot be matched to a venue with confidence, no health section appears rather than a guess. The methodology page sets out exactly where the data is thin and what we refuse to publish.

8,072 venues across 158 official Toronto neighbourhoods, of which 5,372 carry a health inspection history and 5,716 are independent rather than part of a chain.

Venue data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database Licence. Inspection results, neighbourhood boundaries, transit schedules and parking locations come from the City of Toronto Open Data portal.

Venue details can be fixed directly in OpenStreetMap — every venue page links to its record, and a correction there improves every service that uses the same data, not just this one.

Inspection records can only be corrected by Toronto Public Health. If an inspection appears against the wrong business, that is our matching error and we want to know.