The Issue: Whether the city Health Department’s rules and grading system for restaurants is effective.
***
“A Misbegotten War on Restaurants” (Steve Cuozzo, PostOpinion, April 9) missed the key purpose of restaurant inspections and letter grading, which is to incentivize restaurants to use good food-safety practices.
A person may be contagious before developing any symptom, which is precisely why the Health Department encourages food workers to practice good hygiene every day.
And it’s working. Since grading began, more and more restaurants are complying with food-handling rules, earning “A” grades and avoiding fines. In 2011, the first full year after grading took effect, the annual number of salmonella infections fell to a 20-year low — a change not seen in the rest of the state, Connecticut or New Jersey.
Dr. Thomas A. Farley
Health Commissioner NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene
Queens
Spot on, Steve. This is why my wife closed her small cafe in Flushing.
Getting an “A” rating is like getting a scarlet letter. She got fined because the rating grade was posted about 12 inches too low.
Once you get that “A,” inspectors keep showing up more frequently until they find something. Then they come back again and again and wipe out a day’s worth of sales with the stroke of a pen. The place has sat vacant for the last year.
Now about those eye-sore scaffolds…
Matthew Hardy
Manhattan