A former pizza shop owner explains why chefs are terrified of the New York City Health Department — and why whoever designed the letter-grade system may be an 'evil genius'
Photo: Grub Street/Getty Images/iStockphoto It’s been ten years since New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began assigning letter grades to restaurants. Today, diners focus on the grades posted in each restaurant’s window, assuming they’re objective assessments of establishments’ cleanliness. Cooks are obsessed with the points system that the Health Department used to determine violations.
Then, I noticed another layer of crazy being added to the mix. The cooks started to act extremely paranoid. They started to yell at each other about the DOH and points.“The ice machine hasn’t been cleaned — that’s automatic points!”The health inspectors always show up unannounced, so cooks freaked out anytime someone came in wearing a backpack.
“Dude, you don’t even know how bad the DOH is,” the cooks would say. “You’ve never done this — they will shut this place down!” The dish machine also had a chemical level that was a little higher than it should have been — even though technicians came in all the time to make sure it was running correctly. In retrospect: bologna. A technician once told me that health inspectors will sometimes use the “wrong” testing strip on purpose to see if the restaurant’s intimidated cooks will correct them with the right one.
The DOH said the follow-up inspection would happen in about ten days. So, of course, another inspector showed up more than two months later — in the middle of a slammed Friday evening service. It’s the kind of timing that makes every restaurant owner groan, “Whhhyyyyyyyy????” When people leave a restaurant disappointed that their food was slow, due to a health-department inspection, they never write a crap Yelp review of the health department.
Another brilliant aspect of the grading system is that the DOH requires at least one person with a “Food Protection Certificate” to be in the restaurant at all times. Usually called a “food handler’s card,” the city asks cooks to pay $24 to go take a test at an office on the Upper West Side. If you pass, your license is good for life. Yet it was also surprising to me how few cooks had food handler cards. It seemed like I was always hovering around 10 percent of my employees.
Meanwhile, the inspector was looking at the flour dust in our pasta extruder, nevermind that nothing like this is mentioned on the Food Protection test.“We don’t have mice,” I told him. “I can show you the pest-control reports.”“That is a grain of wheat,” I said, picking it up. “We grind flour here.”
It makes complete sense that someone should be certified with proper food-safety training before they oversee the food handling operation at a business that serves food to the public. But it makes less sense that the person has to be there every second the lights are on.
“Oh please!” was the judge’s response. “Listen, everyone that comes in here thinks they are being persecuted.” She understood my concern, she said, “but, look. Don’t go complaining publicly about it. They will come back and turn your place upside down.”
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