Maury Rubin, founder and owner of The City Bakery at 3 W 18th Street in Manhattan, first opened his doors 24 years ago and is well-known around the Union Square neighborhood for creating a hot chocolate so rich, you can almost chew it. Rubin still walks to work in the mornings and loves to shop at the outdoor Greenmarket for ingredients.

Last December, health inspectors from New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene served his bakery a “C” – the most damning letter grade on the rubric – for the second time in three years.

Inspectors found mice, roaches and flies on the premises and cited employees for not holding food at proper temperatures. Recently, Rubin sat down with me at a small table overlooking his spacious café, and explained why he thinks that “C” has more to say about the NYC Department of Health than his bakery.

There is a very clear point in time where everything that a food business in New York had to deal with became more burdensome. Roughly 12 to 14 years ago, the city had budget issues and discovered that very aggressive policing of the food business by the Health Department was an awesome new revenue stream. And I think that’s the no-turning-back moment. …

New York City, when it converted to the letter grade system, kept waving the banner of LA as its go-to example, but it literally took only one thing from LA — the letter grades. It took no methodology, it took none of the approach. It just took the scoring system. When the LA Department of Health walks into your restaurant, they are expecting it to be faithful to the plans that they’ve approved. What New York City is counting on is the opportunity to see things for the first time and say, “Oh no — that’s wrong.” It’s a gotcha system. It’s more adversarial, and it has nothing to do with a very simple, fabulous approach in LA of, “We’re in this together.”

My interest of a safe food supply has everything to do with the welfare of my customers and my business before I even start thinking about the New York City Department of Health. I think most reasonable people would agree on the reasonable view of an operation’s cleanliness, presentation and sanitation. I think that food inspectors walk into City Bakery and they see a big, clean, presentable place. I think this shifts their criteria to where they’re in our sub-basement looking — hoping — for a sink with a washer that’s loose. So 40 feet underground New York, you have a 10-inch hand sink that has a small leak — you’re going to pay about $1,200 for that leak. And that leak is going to be considered a critical violation.

Where one would hope that reason comes to bear in that moment — reason does not exist within the New York City Department of Health. It just doesn’t.