The inspection was not going well for Doma, a cafe in the West Village. The visitor with the clipboard, Mark Nealon, noted that the front door had been left wide open — grounds for a two-point violation and a $200 fine — and that trash was bundled on the stairs leading from the street to the basement kitchen.

Now, near some shelves, he spotted a gap, not even one-sixteenth of an inch wide, around a pipe jutting from new drywall.

“They’ll cite you for that,” he told a co-owner, Evie Polesny, explaining that holes in walls and ceilings, potential conduits for pests, are among the most commonly cited health and safety violations in restaurants. “So what you do is, you get that expanding foam stuff. You can just spray it in.”

Mr. Nealon, an energetic, bright-eyed man, is not an inspector for the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. But he was for three years, before taking up his current profession as a food safety and sanitation consultant, helping restaurants get in shape for the sharp eyes and styluses of computer-carrying bureaucrats.

He is part of an almost entirely unregulated cottage industry that has evolved in New York to run interference with the health department, even pleading the restaurants’ cases at the administrative tribunal where violations can be reduced or dismissed.

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