Worthing Food Hygiene August: A 0 and Two 1s Published Late

Twenty-one of the 22 Worthing premises inspected in August came away with the top food hygiene rating of 5. That is 95%, and it is the borough’s best month of 2026 by a wide margin.

The figures come from the Food Standards Agency’s public register, which records every rating issued by Worthing Borough Council’s food safety team. (Food Standards Agency open data for Worthing, retrieved 1 September 2026)

A caveat first, because it matters. The register publishes with a lag. The most recent rating on it for Worthing is dated 25 August, so inspections carried out in the last week of the month are not yet on it. August’s final count will be higher than 22, and the share of 5s could move.

Every Worthing rating published in August

Five of the 21 top marks went to care homes and a nursery, where catering is done for residents rather than sold to the public. The rest are the shops, takeaways, cafes and pubs a resident would actually walk into.

The one that was not a 5

Amo Cafe Bar Bistro, 98 Montague Street, was rated 3 on 7 August. In the scheme’s own words, a 3 means “hygiene standards are generally satisfactory”. It is not a fail, and the business can keep trading normally. (Food Standards Agency, Amo Cafe Bar Bistro)

The register does not publish the three area scores for this inspection, so there is no public breakdown of whether the deduction came from hygiene practice, the condition of the premises or the management of food safety. The FSA page for any business explains how to ask the council for the food safety officer’s report.

Every business has three safeguards, and they apply here. It can appeal the rating, in writing, “within 21 days of being notified”. It can submit a right to reply “at any time up until your next inspection”, which is then published alongside the rating. And once it has made the improvements, it can ask for a re-rating inspection. (Food Hygiene Rating Scheme guidance for businesses)

August was an outlier, and a welcome one

Worthing’s monthly pattern this year has been steadier and lower than August suggests.

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• May 2026: 11 of 15 inspections scored 5, 73%
• June 2026: 13 of 21 scored 5, 62%
• July 2026: 29 of 49 scored 5, 59%
• August 2026: 21 of 22 scored 5, 95%

Across 2026 so far, Worthing has published 268 ratings: 195 fives, 44 fours, 9 threes, 11 twos and 9 ones.

August is a small sample, and July’s 49 inspections is the bigger and more representative month. But the direction is real: in July the council issued five ratings of 1 or 2, and in August it issued none.

Updated 6 October: that last point no longer holds. Four low ratings from August inspections reached the register after this report was published: a 0 for Finch Bar & Eatery, 27 Warwick Street (18 August), 1s for The Ardington Hotel (17 August) and Jenito’s fried chicken, 143 Montague Street (25 August), and a 2 for the mobile caterer Jasmine Thai (14 August). August now stands at 26 fives from 36 ratings. Our September report has the details.

The wider picture: 34 premises still sit at 2 or below

Take the whole register rather than one month and Worthing looks solid but not spotless. Of the borough’s 1,016 rated premises:

• 751 hold a 5, which is 74%
• 120 hold a 4 and 23 hold a 3
• 19 hold a 2 and 15 hold a 1
• 48 are awaiting their first inspection, and 40 are exempt

The 34 premises at 2 or below are the ones worth watching, and here the lag cuts the other way. Fourteen of those 34 were last rated in 2025, the oldest in February that year. A rating is a snapshot of one visit. When a low one sits unrefreshed for 18 months, the register is telling you about a kitchen as it was, not as it is.

What it means for you

• Check before you order, not after. Every rating is free to look up by name or street on the FSA’s ratings site.
• A 3 is not a closure notice. It means generally satisfactory. A 0 or 1 is the score that should give you pause.
• Look at the date, not just the number. A 1 from early 2025 and a 1 from last month are very different pieces of information.
• Businesses do not have to display the sticker in England. Display is voluntary here. In Wales and Northern Ireland it is a legal requirement. So an empty window in Worthing tells you nothing on its own.
• If you want to see who is open near you, our Worthing local business directory lists the town’s cafes, pubs and takeaways.

Sources

• Food hygiene ratings open data for Worthing, Food Standards Agency, all 1,016 rated premises for local authority 283, retrieved 1 September 2026
• Amo Cafe Bar Bistro rating page, Food Standards Agency, inspection dated 7 August 2026
• Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) guidance for businesses, for what each score means, the 21-day appeal window, the right to reply and re-rating inspections
• Search food hygiene ratings, Food Standards Agency

Correction, 6 October 2026: this report was headlined “21 of 22 August Checks Got 5” and said Worthing issued no ratings of 1 or 2 in August. Ratings below 5 are published three to five weeks after the inspection, so they were not yet on the register. Ratings published since show a 0, two 1s and a 2 from August inspections. The headline has been changed and the paragraph above carries the update.