WIPING CLOTHS: PROPERLY USED & STORED.
Cited at 3,647 of 56,625 graded Chicago inspections — 6.4% of them, the 19th most common violation in the city. Inspections citing it fail 35.6% of the time against a 27.5% baseline, making it a mild signal.
What it means
Violation 41 appears on the Chicago Department of Public Health’s inspection checklist as “Wiping Cloths: Properly Used & Stored.” Its position on that form places it in the priority foundation band — the city does not publish a severity field, so this is inferred from the code number, which is how the form itself is ordered.
Priority foundation violations cover the procedures, equipment and training that make food safety controls possible — the things that have to be in place for a priority item to be met.
How much it actually matters
Ranked by how often it is written up, violation 41 is 19th of 50. Ranked by how strongly it predicts a failure, it is 37th. It is written up far more than its risk warrants — a common finding, and the reason a long violation list is not by itself alarming.
Other priority foundation violations
Violation 41 FAQ
What is violation 41 in a Chicago health inspection?
Violation 41, "Wiping Cloths: Properly Used & Stored", is one of the numbered items on the Chicago Department of Public Health's inspection checklist. By its position on that form it falls in the priority foundation band. Priority foundation violations cover the procedures, equipment and training that make food safety controls possible — the things that have to be in place for a priority item to be met.
Is violation 41 serious?
Measured against outcomes, it is a mild signal. Inspections citing violation 41 ended in a failure 35.6% of the time, against a 27.5% baseline across 56,625 graded Chicago inspections — 1.3× ordinary risk. It is worth noting, but it is not on its own a reason to avoid a restaurant.
How common is violation 41?
It is the 19th most-cited violation in Chicago, appearing at 3,647 of 56,625 graded inspections since 2022 — 6.4% of them.
Can a restaurant fail an inspection for violation 41 alone?
Sometimes. Priority foundation violations can fail an inspection, particularly when several appear together or when a previous one was left uncorrected.
Sources
- City of Chicago — Food Inspections dataset (4ijn-s7e5)Every record referenced on this page.
- Chicago Department of Public Health — Restaurant InspectionHow inspections are conducted and how violations are classified.
How these figures were calculated
The city publishes the records but not these rates. They were derived from 56,625 inspections since 2022 with a graded result of Pass, Pass w/ Conditions or Fail, with each violation string parsed for its leading code number. The rate above is the share of inspections citing violation 41 that ended in a failure. A single inspection commonly cites several violations, so codes are not mutually exclusive. Anyone can reproduce this from the dataset linked above.
Independent service — not affiliated with the City of Chicago, Cook County, or any restaurant. Health inspection data sourced directly from the City of Chicago's public Food Inspections open-data feed (data.cityofchicago.org, dataset 4ijn-s7e5), rebuilt from the live feed on every deploy. Neighborhood is derived from ZIP code and is approximate.