Metro

Mayor’s pals get ‘A’ while system earns ‘F’

The curious case of Per Se — which made a bad Department of Health rating go away with one phone call — gives traumatized restaurant owners even more reason to be paranoid.

Until now, the bistro blitzkrieg at least was perceived as victimizing eateries equally, from pizza joints to four-star gastronomic temples.

Per Se’s seemingly magical feat might change that view. Per Se isn’t just any four-star restaurant — Thomas Keller’s great establishment is personally part-owned by top executives of Related Cos., the Time Warner Center developers who are Per Se’s landlord as well as friends of Mayor Bloomberg, who is counting on them to build Hudson Yards.

(In 2003, I reported that Related CEO/Chairman Stephen Ross and his colleagues held a combined 50 percent stake in Per Se and two other Time Warner Center eateries. A Related rep this week acknowledged they remained “minority investors as individuals.”)

Ross, a man of great integrity, obviously didn’t pick up the phone to Bloomberg. But with DOH making restaurateurs’ lives hell to the extent of requiring a City Council hearing, doesn’t it occur to City Hall that appearances count?

Can owners be forgiven for wondering — as many are doing — whether, in the real-world way of things, somebody at DOH had the Ross-Bloomberg relationship in mind?

When City Council member Peter Vallone Jr. brought up Per Se at yesterday’s hearing, Health Commissioner Thomas Farley stuck to his flack’s line:

Why, anyone can call the number on the inspection report to correct a mistake! Seventy restaurants did just that!

Of course, 70 phone calls are peanuts considering that DOH has conducted hundreds of thousands of inspections since letter grading started.

And I wonder how many of the 70 got DOH to say, “Sure, no sweat! Forget about hiring a lawyer, coming in for a tribunal, hanging a ‘grade pending’ sign in the window, paying a fine and scheduling a re-inspection!”

The letter-grade system’s a travesty, based on rules misunderstood by inspectors who rudely disrupt service at peak hours, sometimes speak taxi-driver English, and know bupkes about modern food preparation.

Sure, some restaurateurs who whine about competition, critics and the cost of halibut should look to their own houses. Yesterday’s $5 million settlement by Mario Batali’s company was the latest involving labor-violation and tip-skimming lawsuits you’d blame on “extortion” if there weren’t so many of them.

But chronic complaining doesn’t mean owners are wrong about DOH harassment, which seems based on the absurd notion that restaurants constitute a mortal health peril.

DOH boasted of a 14 percent plunge in reported salmonella cases in the grading system’s first full year. But the numbers reflect only a minuscule drop in an infection rate that was negligible to begin with.

In fact, reported salmonella cases fell from 15 per 100,000 New Yorkers between 2007 and 2010 to 13.7 cases last year — a difference of 1 case per 70,000 people.

The data don’t even say how many salmonella infections were contracted in restaurants compared with home or anywhere else — nullifying any correlation with inspections . . . per se.