New Restaurant & Bar Openings: Health Permit & Licence Leads

New Restaurant & Bar Openings Leads: Health Permits & Licences

Find restaurants, bars and cafes that are about to open or just opened, straight from official government open data: liquor licence applications, pre-opening health inspections, new food and liquor licences, first inspections and new business registrations. One clean, deduplicated list of business-level sales leads with name, address, type, licence number and the date of the first opening signal.

• 6 jurisdictions, 8 official datasets: New York City, New York State, Chicago, Seattle & King County, Los Angeles and San Francisco
• Pre-opening signals: New York State liquor licence applications are filed weeks before opening; pre-permit and licence health inspections happen days before opening day
• Deduplicated across sources: the same place seen in a health inspection and a liquor licence is one lead, with every signal and source listed
• Filter by business type (restaurant, bar, cafe, bakery, food truck, caterer), city and how recent
• Only new since last run: schedule it weekly and get just the openings you haven't seen
• Business data only: no owner or licensee names of private people, no personal phones or emails (see Data handling and privacy)

Price: $10 per 1,000 leads ($0.01 each). Leads filtered out or already delivered in "only new" mode are free. The prefilled example (NYC + Chicago, last 30 days, 100 leads) finishes in under a minute.

Use this when…

• you sell to new restaurants and bars: food and beverage distribution, POS systems, payroll, linen, waste, pest control, insurance, signage, hiring, delivery platforms
• you want a weekly list of new restaurant openings in NYC, New York State, Chicago, Seattle, LA or San Francisco, including new liquor licences and licence applications
• you need pre-opening leads — places that passed a pre-permit or licence inspection but may not be open yet
• you're tracking restaurant market activity by city or neighbourhood for research, real estate or investing
• an AI agent or automation needs structured "new restaurant" events from official sources

For AI agents

• Run signalloom/restaurant-openings-leads (Apify MCP server call-actor, or the Apify API) with input like {"jurisdictions": ["nyc"], "openedWithinDays": 14, "maxResults": 20}
• Returns one JSON row per new business in the default dataset, newest first: name, businessType, address, city, zip, signal (e.g. pre_opening_inspection), firstSeenDate, licenceNumber, sourceUrl.
• Typical cost: up to 20 leads = $0.20 at most ($0.01 per lead).

How to use it

1. Pick Cities and states (e.g. New York City and Chicago).
2. Set Opened within (days), e.g. 30. Optionally choose Business types (e.g. only bars) or type Cities to narrow a source (e.g. "Brooklyn" for NYC, "Seattle" for King County).
3. Click Start. Export to CSV, Excel or JSON, or send the results to Google Sheets, HubSpot or a CRM with Make, Zapier or n8n.

Recipe: weekly pre-opening leads. Turn on Only new since last run, give it a Monitor ID such as nyc-cafes, and schedule it every Monday. Each run delivers only openings you haven't received before.

Recipe: earliest possible leads. Set Opening signals to Licence application (NY State) and Pre-opening / licence inspection to get places that have applied for a liquor licence or passed inspection but may not be open yet.

Output

Real records from a run on 2026-11-11 (shortened). A new Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn, found by its pre-permit health inspection:

{
  "name": "Black Box Eatz",
  "businessType": "restaurant",
  "cuisine": "Caribbean",
  "address": "675 Flatbush Avenue",
  "city": "Brooklyn",
  "state": "NY",
  "zip": "11225",
  "latitude": 40.656714,
  "longitude": -73.960117,
  "signals": [
    "pre_opening_inspection"
  ],
  "firstSeenDate": "2026-11-06",
  "licenceType": "NYC food service establishment permit (pre-permit inspection)",
  "licenceNumber": "50187842",
  "source": "NYC DOHMH Restaurant Inspection Results",
  "sourceUrl": "https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/43nn-pn8j",
  "leadId": "c0f830ee945e4b74"
}

A New York State liquor licence issued on 2026-11-10 (real record from a run on 2026-11-11, shortened). The licence holder is a company, so it appears as legalEntity:

{
  "name": "Barbuto",
  "legalEntity": "BARBUTO WEST LLC",
  "businessType": "restaurant",
  "address": "521 West St",
  "city": "New York",
  "state": "NY",
  "zip": "10014",
  "county": "New York",
  "latitude": 40.73906,
  "longitude": -74.00968,
  "signals": [
    "new_licence"
  ],
  "firstSeenDate": "2026-11-10",
  "licenceType": "NY SLA: Restaurant",
  "licenceNumber": "0340-22-111917",
  "jurisdiction": "new-york-state",
  "source": "NY State Liquor Authority - Current Active Licenses",
  "sourceUrl": "https://data.ny.gov/d/9s3h-dpkz",
  "leadId": "c441d3cf593bf77d"
}

The same business seen in two Chicago datasets becomes one lead with both signals (sources shortened to 2 of 4 entries):

{
  "name": "Portillo's",
  "legalEntity": "PORTILLO'S HOT DOGS, LLC",
  "businessType": "restaurant",
  "category": "Restaurant",
  "address": "304 N Michigan Ave",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "state": "IL",
  "zip": "60601",
  "neighborhood": "Loop",
  "latitude": 41.886959,
  "longitude": -87.624687,
  "signal": "pre_opening_inspection",
  "signals": [
    "pre_opening_inspection",
    "new_licence"
  ],
  "firstSeenDate": "2026-11-03",
  "licenceType": "Chicago business licence (pre-licence health inspection)",
  "licenceNumber": "3086608",
  "status": "Inspection: Pass w/ Conditions",
  "source": "Chicago Food Inspections (licence inspections)",
  "sourceUrl": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/4ijn-s7e5",
  "sources": [
    {
      "source": "Chicago Food Inspections (licence inspections)",
      "signal": "pre_opening_inspection",
      "date": "2026-11-03",
      "licenceType": "Chicago business licence (pre-licence health inspection)",
      "licenceNumber": "3086608",
      "sourceUrl": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/4ijn-s7e5"
    },
    {
      "source": "Chicago Business Licenses - Current Active",
      "signal": "new_licence",
      "date": "2026-11-06",
      "licenceType": "Retail Food Establishment",
      "licenceNumber": "3086608",
      "sourceUrl": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/r5kz-chrr"
    }
  ],
  "leadId": "d024bdc6ca8f7658"
}

Field	Meaning
name	Business / trade name (DBA) as published
legalEntity	Licence holder, only when it's a company (LLC, Inc, Corp…). Never a person.
businessType	restaurant, bar, cafe, bakery, food_truck, caterer (and retail / other if you ask for them)
cuisine, category	Cuisine (NYC) or the licence's business activity / NAICS class, when published
address, city, state, zip, county, neighborhood, latitude, longitude	Premises location, as published
signal, signals	new_licence, licence_application, pre_opening_inspection, first_inspection or new_business_registration
firstSeenDate	Date of the earliest opening signal
licenceType, licenceNumber, status	Licence, permit or application, its number and status (e.g. "Inspection: Pass", or the NY application status)
source, sourceUrl, sources	The official dataset(s) the lead came from
leadId	Stable ID for the lead

The run summary (key-value store → OUTPUT) shows rows and leads per dataset, merged duplicates, and anything skipped.

Data sources

All sources are official government open-data portals, read only through their official, documented public API (Socrata SODA), with no login and no web-page scraping. Requests are paced at about one per second per portal, as the portals' robots.txt asks.

Jurisdiction	Dataset (publisher)	Opening signal	Updated
New York City	DOHMH New York City Restaurant Inspection Results (NYC Dept. of Health)	Pre-permit (initial) inspection	Daily
New York State	Current Liquor Authority Active Licenses (NY State Liquor Authority)	New on-premises liquor licence issued (restaurant, tavern, club, caterer…)	Daily
New York State	Current SLA Pending Licenses (NY State Liquor Authority)	Liquor licence application received	Daily
Chicago	Food Inspections (Chicago Dept. of Public Health)	Licence (pre-opening) inspection	Daily
Chicago	Business Licenses – Current Active (Dept. of Business Affairs)	New food / liquor licence issued	Daily
Seattle & King County, WA	Food Establishment Inspection Data (Public Health – Seattle & King County)	First inspection on record (data since 2021)	Daily
Los Angeles	Listing of Active Businesses (LA Office of Finance)	New business location, NAICS 722	About monthly
San Francisco	Registered Business Locations (SF Treasurer & Tax Collector)	New business location, NAICS 722	Daily

New York State data comes from Open NY (data.ny.gov). The OPEN-NY Terms of Use allow anyone to reuse the state's open data for any lawful purpose, including commercial projects, with no attribution or pre-approval. This tool uses only the official SODA API the portal provides, at about one request per second.

Want another city or state? Open an issue. Sources are added from official open data only.

Data handling and privacy

• Business-level data only. Licence and permit records often name the owner, licensee or principal, who may be a private person. Those names are never output. A licensee name appears (as legalEntity) only when it is clearly a company (LLC, Inc, Corp, Ltd…). If a business's only published name is a person's name, the record is skipped (counted as suppressedForPrivacy in the run summary).
• No personal contact details. No phone numbers or emails are output.
• Official public sources only. Every record comes from a government open-data portal, published for public reuse (for New York State, under the OPEN-NY Terms of Use), and is read through the portal's official API; a link to the dataset is in each record.
• New York State liquor licences list licensees and principals, who are often private people. This tool outputs only the business's trade name (DBA), its premises address and licence details. A licensee name is output (as legalEntity) only when it carries a company suffix; principals' names are never requested from the source.
• Opt-out. A business can ask to be excluded by opening an issue on the Issues tab. Excluded businesses are skipped and never charged.
• Use the results lawfully: follow the anti-spam and privacy laws that apply to you (for example CAN-SPAM, TCPA, GDPR, CASL) when contacting businesses.

Pricing

• $10 per 1,000 leads output ($0.01 each)
• Leads you filter out (type, city, already delivered) are free; a business found in several datasets is one lead, charged once
• Use Max results to cap the cost of a run.

Limitations

• Coverage is limited to the jurisdictions above, and to what each agency publishes. Some places open without a new licence (e.g. an existing licence transferred), and some licences are for ownership changes of an existing place.
• New York State liquor licence applications can be withdrawn or denied, so an application is an early signal, not a guarantee the place will open. New York State licences also cover NYC, so an NYC place can appear with both a liquor and a health-inspection signal (merged into one lead).
• "First inspection" (King County) and "new business registration" (LA, SF) are strong but indirect signals; a new owner of an existing restaurant can also appear.
• Los Angeles updates its business list about once a month, so very recent LA openings may appear late.
• Business type is taken from the licence, inspection category or NAICS code; when a source only says "food service" or "liquor licence", it's inferred from the business name and may occasionally be off.
• No phone numbers, emails or websites (see privacy). Combine with your own enrichment if you need them.

FAQ

How do I find restaurants that are about to open?

Pick a city and run with Opened within 14–30 days. Liquor licence applications (NY State) and pre-opening health inspections show up before or right at opening day.

How do I get a weekly list of new restaurant openings?

Turn on Only new ("onlyNew": true) with a Monitor ID and schedule it weekly. Each run returns only businesses not delivered before.

Which cities are covered?

New York City, New York State, Chicago, Seattle / King County, Los Angeles and San Francisco, from each one's official open-data portal.

Does it include owner names or personal contacts?

No. Leads are business-level: name, address, type, licence and date, as published in the public records.

Feedback

Want another city or state, or a field? Open an issue on the Issues tab.