The city’s new system of giving restaurants letter grades for cleanliness has been such a hit it should be expanded to food-cart vendors, Mayor Bloomberg said Monday.

“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.

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The National Restaurant Association has formed a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition. The two organizations will work together to promote the new MyPlate program. The MyPlate program highlights the nutritional values of meals served at restaurants around the country.

The new restaurant health rating score system implement by the New York City Department of Health can be difficult for diners to understand. Restaurants receive points for violations, and receive a letter grade from A to C based on how many points they rack up. However, understanding what these violations were and how serious they are remains hard.

Applebee’s parent company, DineEquity, already operates more than 3,500 restaurant locations around the globe. Now the chain will be adding 10 new restaurants in Egypt. Other Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon and Jordan feature Applebees as well and the region has a total of 26 restaurants currently in operation.

Timothy Tatt has been hired by Carrols Restaurant Group to be the new Chief Executive Officer of the Fiesta Restaurant Group subsidy. The group manages the Pollo Tropical and Taco Cabana brands. The company has decided to break their subsidy group off into a separate company by the end of the year and this is the first step in that process.

Palomino Restaurants across the country are celebrating the Siena festival currently taking place in Tuscany from now until August 14^th. This came in the form of Siena inspired menu additions and a giveaway that will send one winner to Siena itself. The winner and one guest will visit the town for the Il Palio race during 2012.

Zoe’s Kitchen, a small chain specializing in Mediterranean inspired dishes, opened its first location in Auburn, Alabama recently. This makes a total of 8 locations in the state for the chain. The restaurant serves Mediterranean flavors in pita pizzas, healthy roll ups made with lean meats and freshly grilled kabobs.

Rudy’s “Country Store” and Bar-B-Q has added a new location in Killeen, Texas. The restaurant will serve a variety of the town residents, including armed forces members from nearby Fort Hood. The grand opening took place on July 23^rd.  The first 100 guests received a free $20 gift card for use in the restaurant or store.

Olive Garden’s Pasta for Pennies fundraiser brought in over $8 million dollars for cancer research. Students around the country added their spare change to classroom containers over the course of three weeks. The class that collected the most at each school won a free pasta party at the nearest Olive Garden Restaurant.

Maggiano’s Little Italy also raised money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The Eat-A-Dish for Make-A-Wish program let guests choose from a menu of eight dishes that all came with a donation to the foundation. The chain raised over $750,000 from menu sales and orders of Leslie’s Lemonade, a special recipe created by a Make-A-Wish Foundation recipient.

While many restaurant patrons have embraced the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s new letter grade evaluation system, the lack of clarity of these marks may have lured even the most informed of foodies into a false sense of safety. In July 2010, the Department of Health began conducting unannounced inspections and assigning letter grades to restaurants according to a point system. The fewer points a restaurant accumulates, the better. If an establishment scores between 0-13, it receives an A, 14-27 earns a B, and if the restaurant scores 28 or more points, it gets a C.

Restaurants accrue points depending on the types of violation and how many violations they are assessed. According to the Department of Health’s website, “A public health hazard, such as failing to keep food at the right temperature to prevent the growth of bacteria, triggers a minimum of 7 points. If the violation cannot be corrected before the end of the inspection, the Health Department may close the restaurant until the hazard is corrected. A critical violation, such as the presence of rodents, carries a minimum of 5 points. A general violation, such as not properly sanitizing cooking utensils, is assigned at least 2 points.”

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Several Ottawa restaurants have been targeted by scammers posing as health inspectors.

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.

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In the kitchen at Sanaa’s 8th Street Gourmet, chef and owner Sanaa Abourezk watches her three full-time and three-part employees to make sure they have washed their hands properly, and she raises an eyebrow to make sure they’re telling the truth.

“They know I’m watching them every second. … You have to be diligent,” she says.

Abourezk credits her hawkish attention to cleanliness in the kitchen for her restaurant’s high health score inspections. She’s not quite satisfied when the score dips below a perfect 100 – she landed a 97 during an inspection in early February – but she feels OK with the score since she didn’t have major mishaps.

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The N.C. Division of Environmental Health is warning restaurant owners to be careful of a scam targeting food service establishments.

State officials say restaurateurs have reported receiving calls from people claiming to be health inspectors or other government officials who tell the business owners of a new inspection procedure.

The phony “government official” provides a numeric code and instructs the restaurant operator to provide this confirmation code when prompted during an automated call or give the code to a health inspector who is scheduled to visit the restaurant. The caller then says that the health inspector will visit the food service establishment the next day between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., or a similar time-frame.

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A person posing as a food inspector unsuccessfully tried to get a Howard County restaurant operator release sensitive information over the weekend, the latest instance in a series of similar incidents around the country in recent months, county health officials said.

Saturday, the restaurant operator got a call from someone posing as a county health inspector who said the Health Department wanted to schedule an emergency food inspection at a specific date and time. The restaurateur was asked for detailed personal and business information, and when she questioned that, was given a telephone number to call to get a special code number and was then told to call back.

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New York’s restaurants sprawl across a vast territory, from the pristine precincts of the multicourse tasting menu to the gritty backwaters of the takeout joint. But there is one grim corner where they all come together: the health department tribunal, a little-publicized court system that metes out penalties for violations of the city sanitary code.

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.

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City officials said Tuesday that they will post closure notices on restaurants considered to be health hazards. The president of the Health Commission also promised to propose further policy changes to boost restaurant inspections and help diners more easily find a restaurant’s health score.

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.

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County leaders will consider a policy Tuesday that would toughen health standards for lunch trucks and mobile food carts, including a requirement that they display restaurant-style quality grades.

“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.

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“Grade pending” signs are starting to sprout across the city as restaurants fight inspection scores that could force them to post Bs or Cs under the new letter-grading system.

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.

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If you’ve eaten in an L.A. County restaurant this century, you’ve seen them: the letter grades handed out by the public health department. They seem to be popular, and have just been adopted in New York City. But how did they get there … and more importantly, do they really keep diners safe?

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.”

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For years, owners from Chinatown to Sunset Park have struggled with stringent temperature rules they say interfered with an age-old tradition: hanging roasted ducks and pork in storefronts.

Now, the Department of Health has altered its rules, allowing ducks and other roasted meat to hang for up to four hours at any temperature.

“We’ve only been cooking the ducks this way for centuries,” said David Louie, chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “It’s nice to know that the board of health finally agrees with us.”

Health Department rules have long required potentially hazardous prepared foods to be kept at either below 41 degrees or above 140 degrees, and only out for up to two hours. Restaurants not adhering to those standards received violations during annual inspections.

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The Health Department’s new restaurant grading program began two weeks ago, and already some famous New York City establishments have received less than perfect marks.

Famed brasserie Les Halles has received 20 ‘violation points,’ which translates to a B.  Inspectors found roaches and unprotected food in Les Halles’ kitchen, both critical violations.  Poor plumbing and a lack of vermin-proofing were also listed on the Health Department’s Restaurant Inspection Information website.

Di Fara Pizzeria, considered to be one of the city’s top pizza restaurants, is just two violation points shy of a C.  Three critical violations — mice, flies, and poor refrigeration or heating equipment — as well as three other violations brought its grade to 26 violation points.

McSorley’s Old Ale  House and the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue have both received over 30 violation points. McSorley’s, the city’s oldest bar, received 38 points, including four critical violations for flies and “tobacco use, eating or drinking…in food preparation , storage, or dishwashing area.”  And the Regency Hotel, with 44 points, had six critical violations, including improperly sanitized utensils and food preparation surfaces, cross-contamination

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The Wabash County Health Department and the Illinois Department of Public Health are warning restaurant owners that imposters are posing as public health officials to schedule appointments and “inspect” Illinois eateries.

The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), Division of Food, Drugs and Dairies, says the impersonator(s) has targeted other state as well, plus foodservices in Canada. IDPH reports its division has been contacted on several occasions in the past week by local health departments and individual foodservice operators regarding a person(s) posing as a public health inspector who tries to schedule an inspection.

These individuals identify themselves as “public health officials” working for the health department. These individuals request to schedule a restaurant inspection, and ask for detailed personal and business information.

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The new requirement that New York City’s 24,000 restaurants prominently display letter grades for cleanliness has provoked dire predictions that would-be customers will flee when they see a big green B or dreaded yellow C in the window.

But while health department officials have only begun the yearlong process of assigning the grades, a potentially more powerful — and, restaurateurs say, misleading — tool is already in use: a health department Web site that has made a wealth of older inspection data easily accessible.

Suddenly, a restaurant’s past lapses are at the fingertips of patrons, who can call up a quick roster of not only the top-scoring places, but also the lowest-ranked — including details of some health violations that may have been remedied, and some that would no longer be considered violations under the new inspection rules.

People who “take the time to go on the Web site will certainly get the wrong impression as to what a restaurant, if they were inspected in June or April or May, what the real score would be” under the new system, said Jeremy Merrin, who owns three Havana Central restaurants in Manhattan.

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On Wednesday New York City rolled out its new system of awarding letter grades to restaurants. Health Commissioner Thomas Farley presented an A to Spark’s Deli in Long Island City.

“We’re happy to get the A,” said Jose Araujo, co-owner of the 24-seat restaurant located at 2831 Borden Avenue, “but now we have to pay $800 for nonfood-related violations,” he said. Among the nonfood violations the restaurant was cited for was a cashier drinking coffee in a nonfood area.

“Every time a health inspector comes in here, I know it’s going to cost me,” Araujo told the New York Times.

The inspectors also handed out B and C grades; however, customers in the city’s 24,000 restaurants likely won’t see them posted until fall. That is because restaurants that do not receive an A will later be automatically re-inspected, and can appeal their grades at administrative hearings.

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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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