Tag Archives: new york

Someone got a star: NYC Health Dept.’s first Grade A bestowed

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A small deli in Long Island City, Queens, will go down in local history as being the first business to earn a Grade A from the city’s health department, which implemented its new restaurant inspection grading system on Tuesday.

Crain’s New York Business (photo from Crain’s) reports the agency is holding a press conference Wednesday morning at Spark’s Deli on 2831 Borden Ave., where health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley will laud the small business’s accomplishment.

Co-owner Jose Araujo said,

“We serve a lot of hard-working people, construction crews and mechanics. And now they’ll know for sure that I provide good food. … We’ve done well in past inspections. There’s always something to fix or be done better, but we’ve never failed an inspection.”

On Tuesday an inspector visited his business, awarding him with a score of 10.

According to the new letter grading system, in which restaurants receive either an A, B or C grade (or fail the inspection altogether), a score of 0 to 13 qualifies as an A.

Other restaurants were inspected on Tuesday and earned A’s, but Spark’s was the first, according to health department officials.

Would you eat cheese made from your wife’s breast milk?

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No, I wouldn’t. Wives are to be cherished, not treated like cows. I have five daughters and they were all breast-fed.

Breast milk is for babies, not food porn.

Daniel Angerer disagrees.

Gael Greene reported back in March how Angerer (sounds like a name Stephen Colbert made up) was serving customers cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

Although the New York Health Department forbade the sale of Angerer’s breasty cheese, Greene secured and sampled some of the wares.

“Surprise. It’s not the flavor that shocks me—indeed, it is quite bland, slightly sweet, the mild taste overwhelmed by the accompanying apricot preserves and a sprinkle of paprika. It’s the unexpected texture that’s so off-putting. Strangely soft, bouncy, like panna cotta.”
 

Avoiding ‘C’ food in New York City

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According to the New York Post, some of the city’s best-known eateries are lucky the Health Department is starting to hand out letter grades next week — instead of last month — because thousands would have ended up with a bottom-rung "C" plastered in their front windows.

Officials estimate that about 6,000 of the city’s 24,000 eateries had enough violation points in June to have earned the lowest mark on a three-letter rating scale devised by the city.

The "C" restaurants would have ranged from the Lion, a sizzling new spot in Greenwich Village, to the venerable Gallagher’s steakhouse in Midtown, to the century-old Katz’s deli emporium on the Lower East Side.

Even Radio City Music Hall’s snack bar made the "C" list.

The Health Department plans to award "A" grades to restaurants that accumulate no more than 13 violation points; "B" to those with 14 to 27 points; and "C" for 28 or more points.

Restaurant owners and managers contacted by The Post who would have faced a "C" last month were surprisingly supportive of the grading system.

"It’s for the sake of public health — I’m perfectly OK with that," said Jake Dell, son of the owner of Katz’s deli, which accumulated 47 points on its record for such infractions as evidence of roaches and mice, as well as bad plumbing.

Like every restaurateur contacted, he said the conditions cited by inspectors have since been corrected. A reinspection July 6 brought Katz’s score down to 23 — in the "B" range.

Listeria and campylobacter contamination in raw milk from New York

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Breese Hollow Dairy sounds like the setting of a bad Johnny Depp movie, but it’s the source of raw milk that tested positive for Llsteria monocytogenes and campylobacter on June 30, 2010.

Samples are taken monthly by the State and tested at the New York State Food Laboratory to determine that the milk is free of pathogenic bacteria. Breese Hollow Dairy also participates in a voluntary food borne pathogen bulk tank testing program through Quality Milk Production Services at Cornell University that tests our milk weekly for pathogens.

To date, no illnesses are known by the Department to be associated with raw milk from our farm and we are doing everything possible to work with the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets.

A final plea by New York restaurateurs before letter grades arrive

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Over 10 years after the Dirty Dining series of articles appeared in the Toronto Star, which led to the creation of the red-yellow-green restaurant inspection disclosure system, and the arguments haven’t changed: people want the information, good restaurants promote their good food safety scores, and the various lobbies think the system is silly.

After watching for 10 years, I figure no politician is going to restrict this kind of information to the public; so figure out the best way to make such information available.

As New York City prepares to adopt a letter-grading disclosure system, similar to that in Los Angeles, the N.Y. Times reports that at a public hearing Tuesday, the health-department announced it had received 280 written public-hearing comments — 273 for, 6 against and one ambiguous. But none of the 80 who attended the hearing came to the plan’s defense.

Vincent J. Mazzone, owner of the Chicken Masters restaurant in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, told the hearing,

“The premise of the letter-grading is sophomoric, and punitive and demeaning to restaurateurs, as if they are schoolchildren who must be graded.”

Marc Murphy, chef and owner of Landmarc Restaurant in TriBeCa, said that average diners “will see a C grade and no one will come in — they might as well close shop. Everyone in our business is not against health inspections, but we don’t want bad letter grades from trivial infractions.”

In March the board voted 6 to 2, with one abstention, to rate cleanliness in the city’s more than 24,000 restaurants using publicly posted letter grades, compelling operators to post inspectors’ ratings that were previously available only at the department or online.

Under the program the city will supply the placards to restaurants rated with a blue A for the highest grade (from 0 to 13 points under the old system), a green B for a less sanitary but still passing rating (13 to 27 points), and a yellow C for a failing grade (28 points or more). The signs are to be dated, and prominently posted in windows or restaurant vestibules.

Thomas Slattery of the United Restaurant and Tavern Owners of New York told the commissioners

“In L.A., it’s basically a joke — everyone gets an A.”

Guess he’s never heard of C is for Chinese in L.A., but people show up anyway.

OMG!!! New York’s American Girl Cafe reopens after noro outbreak

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Tween girls unite: American Girl Place, the tourist-friendly Fifth Avenue high-end doll shop and lunch spot for tween girls, reopened Saturday after being closed several days for a stomach bug outbreak.

The restaurant closed Wednesday after three people who had dined there earlier in the week called to say they all got sick afterward.

A check of past inspections on the department’s website found few, if any, problems with the food at American Girl Place.

Rather, the department figured the problem was a highly-contageous norovirus, or stomach bug that causes vomiting, diarrhea and cramps, usually for one or two days.

Do some reporting, figure out if any of the staff were working while barfing.

Kitchen confidential no more: sanitation grades will be good for New York diners and restaurateurs

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So says Tim Zagat, co-founder and chief executive of Zagat Survey in this morning’s N.Y. Times, adding,

This system can only benefit the restaurant industry, and the health board has been eminently reasonable in what it proposes to do. What’s more, the public overwhelmingly favors the idea. In a recent survey by my company, 83 percent of respondents said that they would like to have grades posted. …

In essence, the New York plan merely makes routine health inspection results more transparent. The city has inspected restaurants for decades, but the results have been available only online or at the health department; now they will be displayed in the restaurant itself. Establishments that fail to get an A on the first inspection will be given a second examination within 30 days, giving them time to correct any failings found in the first go-around.

Quite simply, the inspection process is intended to keep us safe when dining out. … The restaurant association would do well to take its place at the table — and support the proposed grading system.

Best restaurants in New York will proudly promote their A

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The problem with associations is, they strive for the lowest common denominator. Whether it’s state growers, regional restaurateurs or national retailers, there’s too many members to keep happy – too many dues paying members.

Robert Bookman, legislative counsel for the New York City chapters of the New York State Restaurant Association — the operators’ trade group — told the New York Times this morning the NYC Board of Health decision to mandate prominent letter grades be displayed in the city’s more than 24,000 restaurants “will be more misleading than helpful,” adding that “it will be unfair and a black eye to this industry in the restaurant capital of the word.”

I’m not sure what that’s based on. Yes, inspectors can be malicious, callous, unreasonable and unscientific. So can customers who can effectively kill a restaurant with a strategic blog attack. It’s a tough business.

There are also many inspectors who are devoted to public health and fewer people barfing because of the food they eat. When restaurant spokesthingy Geoff Kravitz told the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce last month that the grades would be “a scarlet letter that will keep people from eating out,” and that restaurants posting anything less than an A would be treated by the public like Hester Prynne at a public shaming, he was absolutely right. The available research has shown that the percentage of B, or yellow or whatever restaurants decreases significantly as soon as the eateries are asked to publicly up their game.

Michael White, chef and owner of Alto, Convivio and Marea, got it right when he told the Times,

“I think it’s great, because it will keep everyone on their toes. Customers have high expectations. No one wants to have a B in their window.”

The best restaurants will go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent — whether it’s live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website — to help enhance trust with the buying public. And the best restaurants will proudly proclaim their A.

It’s not cool to barf on other people, or Susan Sarandon

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It’s never good to throw up on other people. Babies and young children can be excused, but what kind of amateur drunk throws up on someone else’s shoes; or on someone else (I’m looking at you, Dani).

Foodborne or not, it’s not cool to barf on other people. Even celebrities. The New York Post reports that the actress Susan Sarandon (right, sorta as shown) was among the late-night partygoers celebrating the third anniversary of the Lower East Side burlesque club, The Box, when transsexual performer Rose Wood vomited on stage directly onto the Oscar winner.

A witness reports, "She actually handled it very well. She was laughing while a bunch of guys came over to towel her off."

As noted in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, always take a towel, wherever you go. Always.
 

Restaurant inspection and disclosure: struggle for resources, debate about disclosure

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People like to eat. People like to eat out. People are interested in how their favorite eateries stack up against others.

It’s a standard story that is being repeated in countries across North America: what restaurants in a region get lousy (and occasionally disgusting) inspections, and what is the best way to make those results available to the public?

The Ottawa Citizen chipped in with a three-part series that wraps up Monday and found 44 per cent of area restaurants and take-out places were cited for a failure to comply with health regulations in the past year.

Since April, Ottawa has made its food inspections available online through a searchable database called EatSafe. Users can type in the name or location of the restaurant to see inspection results (ottawa.ca/eatsafe).

Mike Ziola, president of the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association ‘s Ottawa chapter said Ottawa doesn’t need the colour-coded food safety system used in Toronto, where restaurants are required to post a green, yellow or red warning sign based on their most recent inspection, stating,

“Essentially, a yellow is a red. I don’t know why they even have a yellow.”

Oh. Oh. I do. When Toronto introduced it’s system the restaurant association made the same argument and the city hired me to write a report for the pending court case – which never went to court. Yes, a yellow is like a red, but it allows the restaurant to stay open. And no one wants a yellow, so the percentage of greens has increased dramatically.

Same thing in New York. The Times quotes Geoff Kravitz, a spokesman for the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce, as telling the first public hearing Friday considering the city’s proposal to rate restaurant cleanliness with posted letter grades, as saying,

“Letter grades are nothing more than a scarlet letter that will keep people from eating out.”

Any evidence to support that opinion? Have letter grades in Los Angeles kept people from eating out?

The New York State Restaurant Association maintains that letter ratings would encourage bribery and corruption – since the highly public placards would dramatically raise cleanliness ratings’ significance to restaurateurs.

Always a risk, but the best restaurants will embrace the disclosure system and promote their excellent results.

The Times story notes that in Los Angeles, the letter system has been in effect for more than a decade. According to a 2007 study by the county’s health department, 91 percent of the populace likes the letter-grading plan. But one speaker, Robin Werteheimer, said that restaurateurs in New York “are not Los Angeles,” adding that “most of their buildings are not 200 years old, and most of them are not next to empty lots with hundreds of rats. It would be nice if the city would clean up those lots.”

Cleveland has new on-line access to restaurant inspection reports, but some are already demanding information on the door.

The New Brunswick Health Department makes all restaurant inspection report cards available to the public on the provincial government website. They can be found at www.gnb.ca under Food Premises Inspection Results.

The province started posting inspection reports on its website in 2007, mainly as a way for restaurant customers to keep an eye on food service establishments.

In Wisconsin, Nancy Eggleston, Wood County environmental health and communicable disease supervisor, said the state will begin the switch from paper to paperless forms of restaurant inspection records, and counties will have the option of placing the inspections on a Web site to make them easily available to the public.

And that’s just one weekend worth of stories. People like this stuff. No politician wants to say, “you, citizen, can’t have this information.” The challenge is to provide the disclosure results in a fair and meaningful manner.