What good are punitive, minutiae-absorbed restaurant inspections that cripple perfectly safe eateries in mid-meal — but can’t protect the public from a real risk?
Earlier this month, Mayor Bloomberg himself had his dinner at La Grenouille interrupted when a city health inspector brought the kitchen to a standstill. After delaying service for up to an hour, the agent renewed the famous French eatery’s A rating.
Then, last week, a case of hepatitis A rocked Alta, a Mediterranean restaurant in the West Village. A pastry handler had contracted the potentially deadly liver virus in Mexico. No customers are known to have been infected, but hundreds who ordered dessert in the period when the unknowingly diseased employee was in the kitchen are theoretically at risk.
But the issue isn’t an exceedingly rare case of danger to the dining-out public. It’s that Alta, like La Grenouille, enjoyed an “A” rating from the Department of Health. (The agency is now offering free inoculations to recent customers.)
The Alta case illustrates that no inspection system is perfect — and reminds us, too, how uncommon are actual threats to public safety in restaurants, usually due to circumstances no inspection could catch.
While DOH agents fuss over the inches between a door bottom and the floor, Hepatitis A walks in through the same door — just as a 6-inch hunting knife made its way onto my JetBlue flight that TSA staff had “protected” by confiscating shampoo vials.
Consider this “critical” infraction from a 24-page online set of “Inspection Scoring Parameters” helpfully posted on the DOH Web site:
“Reduced Oxygen Packaged Food not cooled by an approved method whereby the internal product temperature is reduced to 38 degrees within 2 hours of cooking and if necessary further cooled to a temperature of 34 degrees within 6 hours of reaching 38 degrees.”
Despite numerous such alleged perils to the dining millions, there were no reports of mass food poisoning prior to when the DOH ramped up its inspections to wartime levels under Bloomberg.
I’ve eaten tens of thousands of restaurant meals in the city, starting long before I became a reviewer for The Post. I can’t cite a single instance of being sickened from meals cheap and expensive, at places glamorous and bare-bones. (Occasional tales of “food poisoning” invariably proved to be the result of margarita over-consumption.)
The DOH war on eateries is mostly about raising revenue through fines, a number which swelled from $16 million to $45 million from 2006 to 2012.
The fines disproportionately hurt small, family-owned cafes struggling to survive. If the fee is $5,000 to stay open after a critical inspection — which is what’s often going on when you see one of those “Grade Pending” notices in the window — it’s $5,000 whether the owner is an Ecuadorean or Malaysian immigrant, or a famous restaurant empire bankrolled by a Mideast sovereign-wealth fund.
Meanwhile, the DOH winks at a real health menace: bad food sold from street carts. Sure, the agency levied $15 million in fines against carts last year — but it only followed up to collect only $1 million. Nor are the carts subjected to letter grading. This in spite of recent TV footage showing vendors use the same towel they blew their nose in to rub sauce on souvlaki.
The increasingly common, invasive and indefensible restaurant raids, like the one that frequent diner-out Bloomberg experienced, effectively shut down a place for the night, costing precious revenue and alienating customers.
A typical, heinous case occurred at Lyon, a since-closed French bistro in the West Village. In mid-December 2011, when it was booked with holiday parties, a DOH man showed up unannounced around 7:30 p.m.
The agent brought the entire eatery to a standstill, forcing cooks to stop work so he could snoop around and commandeering a dining room table for paperwork — while customers at the bar were waiting to be seated.
Lyon had to refund dinner costs to customers who dutifully paid up after their meals finally came 90 minutes late — and cold.
That isn’t protection, it’s malicious interference to raise a few bucks for the municipal treasury. It’s no way to treat small business or to keep us safe.
Bloomberg, who spends many an evening dining out, should know better. But maybe to a mega-billionaire, a few grand to appease the DOH is merely a tip.