New York City’s 24,000 restaurants include fast food outlets selling chicken by the bucket and temples of haute cuisine where multi-course tasting menus can cost hundreds of dollars per person — before the wine.

But whether they have three stars from Michelin or three flavors of milkshake, all the restaurants soon will share some common ground — a letter-based A, B or C — grading system aimed at informing diners about cleanliness and food safety.

And it has some restaurateurs worried that restaurants that earn a B or a C will go out of business as diners flock to the competitor with an A in the window.

“Some will undoubtedly close if they get a B or a C,” said Robert Bookman, a lawyer for the New York State Restaurant Association, which vehemently opposes the letter grades.

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Restaurants in Washington state, other states, and Canada are being targeted by the scam, which involves a series of phone calls, reports the Washington State Attorney General’s Office.

The first caller tells the restaurant that it will receive an automated call providing a numeric confirmation code. A second caller, claiming to be a health inspector, requests the code and seeks to set up an in-person restaurant inspection. The caller threatens fines if the restaurant doesn’t cooperate.

Officials in Stanislaus County, Calif., issued an alert last week. It stated that the phony inspector scheme is part of a larger fraud involving setting up verified accounts with a national online auction service. The fraudster then uses the accounts in other schemes.

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In the wake of the 2005 South Wales E. coli outbreak that sickened 168 people, there is widespread disappointment among consumers that restaurant and takeout businesses will not be forced to display their food hygiene score to customers. 

According to WalesOnline, this finding came from a consumer survey commissioned by the Food Standards Agency which took the controversial decision to allow takeaways, cafes, shops, and restaurants to hide poor ratings from customers.

According to the UK’s Food Standards Agency, “The primary purpose of these Scores on the Doors schemes is to allow consumers to make informed choices about the places in which they eat out and from which they purchase food, and, through this, to encourage businesses to improve hygiene standards.”

A consumer watchdog said the survey was proof the display of cleanliness ratings given under the agency’s new “scores on the doors” scheme should be mandatory.

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The NYC Health Department announced the final rules and procedures to implement its new restaurant grading system. The rules, available online at nyc.gov/health, ensure that the letter grades posted in restaurant windows reflect practices and conditions that relate to food safety. In developing the rules, the Health Department considered input it received from the public and the restaurant industry during a month-long comment period. Starting June 15, 2010, the agency will offer free workshops on the new rules for restaurant owners and operators in every borough and multiple languages. The first graded inspections will occur in late July.

“New York City is justly famous for its restaurants,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, New York City Health Commissioner, “and many of them have excellent food-preparation practices. Too many, though, are not operating as safely as they should. Letter grading enables diners to make more informed choices about where to eat. And by making the inspection system more transparent, it gives restaurant operators an added incentive to meet the highest standards in food safety.”

Under the new system, restaurants with A grades will be inspected annually, but those receiving lower marks will get more frequent visits. The new system focuses City resources on restaurants that warrant the closest monitoring, and gives lower-scoring establishments frequent opportunities to improve their grades.

In March, the city’s Board of Health voted to mandate the posting of sanitary inspection grades near restaurant entrances – a reform that will better inform consumers about restaurants’ sanitary conditions and motivate restaurant operators to improve them. The Health Department released proposed rules to implement the reform for public comment in April. Under the now final rules, a restaurant receiving 0 to13 violation points on an initial inspection would receive a grade of A, which would be posted immediately. Those with more points would get a chance to improve their scores on a re-inspection conducted a short time later. Those scoring 14 to 27 points on the Re-inspection would get Bs, and those with 28 or more would get Cs. If a restaurant wants to contest a B or C grade, it can post sign that says Grading Pending until it has had a chance to be heard at the Health Department’s Administrative Tribunal. It will take a little over a year for the Health Department to issue grades to all of New York City’s restaurants. Until then, consumers can check the agency’s restaurant inspection website for inspection results.

Each year the Health Department inspects 24,000 restaurants to monitor their compliance with city and state food safety regulations. Though most establishments maintain good conditions, lapses in hygiene and food handling contribute to an estimated 10,000 emergency room visits and several thousand hospitalizations in New York City each year. By encouraging better food safety practices, letter grading could help reduce food-borne illness in New York City. When Los Angeles instituted a letter grading system, the proportion of restaurants meeting the highest food-safety standards rose from 40% to more than 80%, and hospitalizations for food-borne illnesses declined.

Food-borne illness also occurs from cooking and eating in the home. The Health Department encourages New Yorkers to carefully clean ready-to-eat food, disinfect surfaces and utensils used to prepare raw meat or other potentially hazardous foods, separate foods to prevent cross-contamination, cook and maintain foods at proper hot or cold temperatures, and keep kitchens free of pests and dangerous chemicals. To learn more – or to get more information on the Health Department’s free workshops for restaurant owners and operators – please visit nyc.gov/health.

Source:  NYC.gov

Health officials in Vancouver are warning restaurant owners about a North America-wide phone scam in which callers posing as health officials try to get businesses to schedule inspections of their premises that never actually take place.

It is not yet clear what the purpose of the fraudulent calls is or even who is getting scammed.

Richard Taki, the regional director of health protection for Vancouver Coastal Health, described the scam in the following way:

• The fake official calls up a restaurant threatening to fine the establishment unless the owner books a health inspection.
• The caller advises the restaurant owner that a subsequent automated call will provide them with a numeric code that they should write down.
• Shortly after they get the automated call, another person calls who says they are from the Health Department and asks for the numeric code.
• The fake health official advises the restaurant to set up an in-person inspection and threatens to fine the establishment if it doesn’t co-operate.

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The city’s new restaurant letter-grading plan, which will hand out As, Bs and Cs for the first time, received a big F from restaurateurs.

Vincent Mazzone, owner of the Chicken Masters restaurant in Brooklyn, called the idea “sophomoric, and punitive and demeaning to restaurateurs, as if they are schoolchildren who must be graded,” according to The New York Times’ Diner’s Journal blog.

The letter-grading program, which begins in July, will improve the quality of restaurant meals, the city’s Health Department insisted. The city will provide placards to restaurants, which will be rated with a blue A, a green B or a yellow C. The signs must be displayed in a prominent place in the restaurant’s vestibule or front window.

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About every six months, a sanitarian from the Marietta City Health Department conducts an inspection at the Busy Bee Restaurant on Gilman Avenue in Marietta.

And although the sanitarian always visits the restaurant without warning, Georgann Wade, co-owner of the restaurant, said she’s always happy to see him or her coming.

“We’re glad to have them here,” she said. “It keeps us on our toes.”

Sanitarians with the Marietta and Belpre health departments conduct inspections at food service operations within their respective city limits. The Washington County Health Department inspects all other food service operations in the county.

The sanitarians fill out a report each time they conduct an inspection, and the reports are a matter of public record.

Wade said she likes the fact that the general public has access to this information.

“I think the public needs to know when they walk into a restaurant what they’re getting into,” she said.

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The staff at Brigitte’s prepares most of the food from scratch, making soups and roasting beef in their kitchen. St. Cloud Environmental Health Specialist Jim Schloegl said the cafe is one of the best in the city for keeping its food safe and restaurant clean.

“Their staff has been there a long time and a large number of their staff is family, so they have a lot more invested,” he said.

Schloegl is in charge of restaurant inspections for St. Cloud. Each year the St. Cloud Health & Inspections Department checks out dozens of conditions and procedures at more than 500 establishments, including restaurants, pools and lodging businesses.

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It’s a New York ritual: You fall in love with an eatery, only to find it shut down by the Health Department.

Well, last year, it happened a lot more.

The Health Department shut down 1,758 restaurants last year, 27% more than in 2008.

But health bosses swear city restaurants aren’t getting dirtier – they just did more inspections.

“We got to more restaurants last year,” said Assistant Health Commissioner Daniel Kass. “When you get to more, you are going to find more.”

The previous year also produced an unusually low number of closures because inspectors were bogged down with new rules that had them searching for trans fats in food and calorie counts on menu boards. Those violations won’t close a restaurant, but they will slow down the inspection process.

On the other hand, any public health hazard that can’t be fixed at the time of the inspection, such as a broken refrigerator, gets a spot closed immediately.

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Step inside the double doors of one Mesa County restaurant and expect to be awed with the rendition of a lotus flower unfolding in the tile work. An expansive buffet is creatively encased in a wooden boat, and rows of tabletops are shined to a deep walnut-colored brown. Booths are separated by ornate, glass-encased, wooden, miniature snapshots of traditional Chinese life: quaint bridges, bamboo huts and blooming trees. A faux, budding cherry tree appears to grow up the side of one wall, its branches dangling above some patrons’ heads.

Despite the immaculate interior and cheerful staff who hadn’t received one complaint from customers about the food, Grand International Buffet, 2504 U.S. Highway 6&50, was cited as the county’s top food sanitation violator in 2009, with 20 critical violations.

But that was last year.

The restaurant that opened in the fall of 2008 recently received perfect scores in areas of cleanliness and food safety from the Mesa County Health Department, and its staff is not shy about advertising the changes.

Furthermore, all of the 17 restaurants that received 10 to 20 critical violations during two separate, unannounced checks by health inspectors in 2009 have made major improvements to food health and sanitation practices, according to county records and interviews with restaurant staff.

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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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by Tim Zagat, Zagat Survey

The New York City Board of Health has voted to require the city’s 24,000-plus restaurants to post at their front doors letter grades reflecting the results of their sanitary inspections. The grades range from A (for the highest level of cleanliness) to B (passing) to C (failing).

Not surprisingly, some restaurateurs and their trade association, the New York State Restaurant Association, have reacted with alarm, claiming that the new system will give a “black eye” to the industry. The association’s representatives have hinted that they may challenge the regulation in court.

They’re woefully misguided.

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.

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In late 2007, an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness sickened two dozen people at a Southampton restaurant, prompted state intervention and may have contributed to an elderly woman’s death.

Elsewhere, area diners have chewed on rodent limbs and old Band-Aids found in takeout food and salad bars in recent years, while one woman got hit with a $1,220 bill last fall after being hospitalized with food poisoning in Hadley. The alleged culprit?

A tainted hamburger.

These are among the complaints filed each year with local health inspectors, whose job it is to educate kitchen workers and prevent food-borne illness through preventive sanitary inspections at hundreds of food establishments in the Valley.

But a Gazette review of restaurant inspection files finds that many cities and towns are not keeping pace with the state’s sanitary code, which requires local health departments to conduct inspections at six-month intervals, or twice yearly.

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The New York City Board of Health voted Tuesday to rate cleanliness in the city’s more than 24,000 restaurants with publicly posted letter grades, adopting a controversial plan proposed 14 months ago by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

In a 6-to-2 vote, with one abstention, the board decided to compel restaurateurs to post inspectors’ numerical ratings, which were previously available only at the department or online at nyc.gov/health. And in a program that is to start in July, 8-by-10-inch placards, to be supplied by the city, will rate restaurants 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 will be dated, and are to be prominently posted in windows or restaurant vestibules.

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On the heels of figures that show a staggering 82 percent of food establishments inspected on O’ahu last fiscal year had major violations, lawmakers are looking to beef up the state’s restaurant inspections system.

A bill moving through the Legislature would allow the Health Department to use the fees it gets from restaurants to hire more inspectors and put food violation records online.

The legislation would also open the door to raising fees for restaurants in a bid to subsidize an inspection system — now paid for by taxpayers — that has weathered spending cuts for the last 20 years and has seen its cadre of state food safety inspectors on O’ahu shrink from 23 in 1988 to just nine today.

“The horror story is major violations are so commonplace,” said Peter Oshiro, supervisor of the Department of Health’s Sanitation Branch, which oversees food establishment inspections. “It’s shocking. It’s endangering the public. With more frequent inspections, you can bring that number down.”

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Haven’t we been here before? TV news crew gets all feisty, posts up a few restaurateurs and berates them about their negative health department scores.

Oh, I almost forgot. We’re in a sweeps month, right?

I suppose if viewers weren’t interested, stations wouldn’t send their reporters out to cover these sordid, soiled tales. But to me, it’s old news.

When I was a chef, the last pop inspection I went through netted a score of 94, an A by today’s standards. But trust me, that’s because the inspector was kind and surely had several other places to review that day. In fact, the guy showed me several things he “could have checked,” but didn’t, not because he was lording his power over me. Rather he was gently reminding me of other superficial areas—i.e. things he could readily see without digging much—that needed to be addressed. Those and so many more.

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• Servsafe Starters Employee Guide
• ServSafe Essentials with Answer Sheet for Paper and Pencil Exam
• ServSafe Coursebook (text only)
• ServSafe Coursebook: with the Certification Exam Answer Sheet
• ServSafe Essentials (text only)
• ServSafe Alcohol: Fundamentals of Responsible Alcohol Service with Exam Answer Sheet
• ServSafe Essentials Spanish with Answer Sheet
• Servsafe Alcohol + Exam Answer Sheet Fundamentals of Responsible Alcohol Service

Lenny Wells, co-owner of Table 24 Restaurant, takes absolute pride in the cleanliness and food safety procedures at his high-end establishment.

In fact, where other restaurateurs may quake at the unannounced arrival of an Interior Health public health inspector, Wells rolls out the welcome mat.

“I get the biggest smile on my face when they arrive here during the middle of the lunch rush, because I know everything’s going to look how it should be. They can get down on their knees and get out their flashlights and I am confident the report is going to be a good one.”

The young restaurateur points to his pride and integrity when it comes to serving customers in a safe, clean manner.

He and his staff follow strict food safety plans and procedures and all are trained in safe food handling protocols.

“That should be on every restaurant owner’s brain every single day, but I know that isn’t always the case.”

Continue reading . . .

• Servsafe Starters Employee Guide
• ServSafe Essentials with Answer Sheet for Paper and Pencil Exam
• ServSafe Coursebook (text only)
• ServSafe Coursebook: with the Certification Exam Answer Sheet
• ServSafe Essentials (text only)
• ServSafe Alcohol: Fundamentals of Responsible Alcohol Service with Exam Answer Sheet
• ServSafe Essentials Spanish with Answer Sheet
• Servsafe Alcohol + Exam Answer Sheet Fundamentals of Responsible Alcohol Service