How AI can check a restaurant before you book

Today's Tip: Vetting a restaurant before you book

The star rating on the front page is not the number that tells you whether a kitchen is clean. There's another score… and almost nobody checks it.

Let me explain…

My friend George was picking a restaurant for a big family dinner… his niece's graduation. Twelve people. Some traveling in from out of state. He wanted to get it right.

He did what most of us do. He opened his phone, looked at Google star ratings, scrolled through some photos, read a few reviews. Everything looked good. Four-and-a-half stars. Warm-toned food shots. The AI-generated summary at the top called it "a beloved neighborhood favorite."

He almost booked it right there.

Then his neighbor, a retired public health nurse, mentioned something over the fence. She said before she eats anywhere new, she pulls up the county's inspection report. Every restaurant gets inspected. Every county publishes the results. And the score has nothing to do with stars.

George didn't even know where to find that. Neither did I, honestly. But it turns out you don't have to hunt through government websites… you can ask an AI to do it for you. If you pick the right one.

Here's the exact prompt George used…

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What’s the upside potential here?

I know this is going to sound crazy…

But Elon is projecting growth of over 7,000,000%.

Let that sink in.

That’s enough to turn $100 into more than $7 million.

This sounds absolutely insane.

But then again… everything Elon has ever done sounded insane at first.

Self-driving cars.

Reusable rockets that land themselves.

Brain chips that let paralyzed people control computers with their minds.

Crazy ideas.

But he turned them into trillion-dollar realities.

So here’s the real question…

Will you watch Elon build another empire from the sidelines…

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Click here to get the details because I believe Elon will flip the switch on this new invention by the end of this month.

      ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
    

★ The Kitchen Check

Works in Claude, Gemini & Grok

I'm considering [RESTAURANT NAME] at [FULL ADDRESS, CITY, STATE] for a family dinner. Before I book, I want to check its most recent health inspection.

Please do the following, in this order:

1. Find the official city or county health department inspection database that covers this address.

2. Look up the most recent inspection report for this specific restaurant.

3. Tell me the inspection date, the score or grade, and any critical or major violations noted.

4. Give me the link to the source so I can read it myself.

Do not summarize customer reviews or star ratings — I only want the official inspection record. If you cannot find an official report for this restaurant, tell me plainly that you could not find one, and do not guess.

Why this works: You tell Grok exactly what to do, in order, and what to avoid doing. You block it from wandering off into review summaries. And you make it show you the source, which lets you check the answer yourself in about thirty seconds.

George typed this into Grok. Within a few seconds he had the answer.

The restaurant he was leaning toward had been inspected six weeks earlier. Score in the low seventies. Three critical violations, one of them repeat — improper cold-holding temperatures on chicken. Grok included the direct link to the county's PDF, and George clicked through to read it himself.

He booked a different place. The second one had a recent inspection with zero critical violations, a score in the mid-nineties, and a clean track record over three inspections. Same neighborhood. Same price range. Better rating in exactly the way that matters.

★ Today's "Aha!" Moment

Star ratings tell you how the food tastes to strangers. The health inspection tells you what the kitchen looks like when the door is closed. Both are useful… but only one of them is written by a trained inspector who was actually standing in that kitchen.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "This sounds like extra work I'm never going to do." I hear you. Nobody wants to be the person running background checks on brunch spots.

But here's the thing. The whole search takes about a minute. You paste in the address, Grok does the digging, you get a link. You don't have to become a food-safety detective. You just get to see the report the inspector already wrote. And you only need to do this for the meals that matter — birthday dinners, first dates with someone new, taking the grandkids somewhere fancy. Not your regular Tuesday sandwich place.

★ One Thing to Watch

Not every county publishes inspection data online, and some are slow to update. If Grok says it can't find a record, that doesn't automatically mean the restaurant is bad — it might mean the local health department hasn't posted its data yet, or the county uses a paper-only system. In that case, you can call the local health department directly and ask, or check for a printed inspection placard by the front door when you arrive.

The next time you're picking a spot for a meal that matters, spend the minute. Ask Grok to pull the actual inspection.

You'll never look at a five-star review the same way again.

★ ★ ★

Tool Spotlight ★

Grok

Site: grok.com

Made by: xAI

Cost: Free tier available

Grok's strongest feature is its live connection to the web. It doesn't try to remember everything… it looks things up in the moment. That's exactly what you need for a restaurant inspection lookup, because health department databases update constantly and any AI answering from memory would give you a report that's months out of date.

The current free version, Grok 4.5, runs at grok.com — you sign in with Google or email and start typing. It works especially well when you tell it to cite its sources, because it will actually pull up the government portal or agency page and show you the link. That's the trick with Grok: give it a specific task and demand a source.

Best for: Current events, product comparisons, local government records, live news, price checks, source-linked lookups where you want to see the original.

★ ★ ★

★ Quick Wins

The Pharmacy Hours Check — Before you drive out to a store, ask Grok to confirm current hours. Type: Are the CVS locations in [YOUR ZIP CODE] open right now, and what are today's hours? It pulls from current listings and often catches holiday hours or unexpected closures that Google Maps still shows as open. Works well in Grok because of the live search — Claude and Gemini can do this too, but Grok is faster on hyper-local status.

The Weather-Route Check — Before a long drive or a flight, ask Grok: What's the weather along the drive from [START CITY] to [END CITY] today between 8am and 6pm? Any storm warnings or road closures I should know about? Please cite the source. It combines live weather feeds with state DOT alerts and gives you the picture in one answer. Works well in Grok and Gemini.

The Local Meeting Lookup — If you want to find out when your city council or school board meets next, ask Grok: When is the next public meeting of the [CITY NAME] city council? Please give me the date, time, and agenda link from the official city website. It cuts through outdated news articles and finds the current schedule. Works in Grok and Gemini.

Skill Builder: The Verify Prompt

There's a small change you can make to almost any AI prompt that will dramatically improve the answer you get back. It's this: ask for the source before you ask for the summary.

Most people write prompts like this: "Tell me about X, and give me a source." The AI writes its answer first and then hunts around for something to link to at the end. What often happens is that the source doesn't actually match what it just told you… but by then you've already read the answer and moved on.

Flip the order. Ask the AI to find a specific source first, read it, and then report what it says. This shift forces the AI to be an investigator, not a storyteller. The answer becomes tied to a real document instead of being generated from a hazy blend of training data.

The Verify Prompt gives you a reusable structure. You describe what you want to know, name the type of source you'd trust, and tell the AI not to answer if it can't find one. It saves you from confident-sounding answers that fall apart the second you try to follow up on them.

★ The Verify Prompt

Works in Claude, Gemini & Grok

I want to know [SPECIFIC QUESTION]. Before you answer, please do this:

1. Search for a primary source — an official website, a government agency, a peer-reviewed study, or a first-party company page.

2. Read the source.

3. Then tell me what it says, and include the direct link.

If you cannot find a source that answers this specific question, say so. Do not guess, and do not fill in gaps from general knowledge. It is better to tell me you don't know than to give me an answer you can't back up.

Why this works: The prompt reorders the AI's thinking. Instead of writing an answer and hunting for a source to justify it, the AI has to find the source first and then report on it. It also gives explicit permission to say "I don't know," which is the single most useful thing an AI can say when it doesn't actually have the answer.

The Verify Prompt works in every AI tool, but it shines in Grok because Grok is built to pull live sources. Copy it into a note on your phone. Save it in an email to yourself. You'll use it more than any other prompt in your collection.

The next time an AI gives you a confident-sounding fact and you're not sure whether to trust it… run the Verify Prompt against the same question. If the two answers match, you've got something solid. If they don't, you know to slow down and look at the source yourself before acting on it.

How AI can check a restaurant before you book

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