“I love to eat from the street vendors,” Bloomberg said at a Queens deli Monday. “Personally, I would love to see … a sign up there telling whether or not the guy washed his hands before he reaches in and pulls out the hot dog.”

Grading halal carts and hot-pretzel stands may seem like a good idea to Hizzoner, but the city health commissioner said it might be hard to track down the roving grub purveyors.

Continue reading . . .

In a typical fraud, the phoney official contacts a restaurant and solicits sensitive banking and financial information about the business. Sometimes they threaten a restaurant with fines if the manager doesn’t call a given phone number and enter particular codes. In other variations, an eatery manager is told to expect an automated call and to dial a code when it comes.

The scammer uses the information and phone confirmations to set up fake sales on online sites like eBay, Craigslist and Kijiji from which they pocket the cash and never supply any goods.

Continue reading . . .

The city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene says the system has achieved its intended effect of spurring restaurants to improve their cleanliness and food safety.

But many in the restaurant industry — including owners of “A” restaurants — still believe the system is subjective and unfair.

Continue reading . . .

It has been there for years, in a nondescript government office in Lower Manhattan where more than a dozen administrative law judges escort their charges into cramped rooms and hear them wrangle over infractions, in a ritual reminiscent of visiting the principal’s office.

Continue reading . . .

Those frontier days may be about to end.

Los Angeles County is moving to submit its flock of 9,500 food trucks and carts to the same health department rules as restaurants — including requiring them to prominently post a letter grade based on food inspections — in what may be the ultimate sign that this faddiest of food fads is going mainstream.

Continue reading . . .

In a two-page report presented to members of a Health Commission subcommittee, Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, San Francisco’s director of occupational and environmental health, outlined the state of the city’s food safety inspection program.

Notably, the report included a new provision that will arm health inspectors with public closure notices to post at restaurants where imminent health hazards are discovered or that have continued health code violations. Unlike Los Angeles and Sacramento, San Francisco restaurants that are closed for health violations are not required to post an official notice. Instead, owners often put up signs saying they are closed for renovations, health inspectors told Mission Loc@l earlier this year.

Continue reading . . .

“We think this is an idea whose time has come,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. “This is about protecting the consumer.”

The new policy would require about 6,000 catering trucks operating throughout the county to undergo three inspections a year: two graded inspections and one certification inspection.

Depending on the outcome, the truck would have to display a placard with a grade of “A” (scoring above 90 percent in food safety and quality), “B” (scoring above 80 percent) or “C” (scoring above 70 percent). Any truck scoring below a C grade would be shut down.

Continue reading . . .

Other restaurants are waiting anxiously for second inspections, which are supposed to take place two to three weeks after initial inspections, to give restaurants a chance to improve scores.

Because the letter-grading stakes are so high, some restaurants have hired consultants to do weekly walk-throughs. Others are avoiding putting most prepared foods on display, afraid of racking up temperature violations.

Continue reading . . .

Is it safe to eat at a restaurant with anything less than an A? When you eat out in L.A. County, you don’t often see a place with a B; C’s are even more uncommon. In a survey by L.A. County, just 3 percent of diners said they’d eat somewhere with a C.

But somebody must keep going to those C restaurants. Are those brave customers just lucky? Joel Grover thinks so, he’s an investigative reporter with KNBC 4. “To get a C — I know this — a restaurant has to be filthy,” he said. “They have to have numerous serious violations, and they have to have many minor violations too.”

Continue reading . . .