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Gothamist reports that New York City announced over the weekend that it will soon begin requiring restaurants to display Los Angeles-style health inspection letter grades. Now today, D.C. Council member Mary Cheh sent out a press release announcing her intention to introduce similar legislation here in the District.
“D.C. should get up to speed and join major cities around the nation that grade restaurants for food safety,” said Cheh. “Making restaurants post their health grade will give residents the tools they need to make an informed choice about the safety of the food they consume. Moreover, this bill will create an environment where restaurateurs are publicly encouraged to keep their kitchens clean.”
Cheh intends to introduce the bill on Tuesday. The move comes about seven months after the release of a report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest that scolded the District for making it far too difficult for consumers to get restaurant health and safety inspection reports.
City Desk also notes Cheh's announcement, and sees the pushback from restaurant owners coming down the bend. Based on my experience living in Los Angeles for about five years, I can tell you that these letter grades have swift consequences. Even establishments that end up with B's in their windows notice a decline in customers. The key to making a program of this sort work for everyone is to make sure inspections occur regularly, so that a restaurant that makes all the necessary improvements can have their letter grade updated in a timely manner. If D.C. health inspectors get backlogged and a restaurant that's worked to come into compliance ends up stuck with the existing grade in the window for a lengthy time, it could spell the end of that establishment.
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Good idea, in theory, but if the health inspectors aren't up to the task of staying current on inspections, then expect lawsuits galore as business owners with an initial grade of anything less than a B start getting angry that the city hasn't re-inspected their establishment (and, more particularly, the improvements in response to the poor showing the first time around). If we expect restaurant owners to have their shit together - no pun intended - then D.C. had better be ready to do the same.
On a related note, the new regime should mandate that any establishment that willingly serves Monkey will automatically receive a "C" grade. This is due to the inevitable spread of fecal matter resulting from such a visit.
How often will they be inspected? A restaurant can go from A+ to F- in a week if they get raided by INS. And have you people actually read the health inspection web site? Granted, DC's is a POS, but if you check out Fairfax County's, the high end restaurants get the worst health inspection notices ("Dairy products kept above commode. Toilet paper hung in illegal overhand fashion.") There's, what, five health inspectors for all of DC. They can barely handle the caseload as is.
Also, my condition is called "septic ebola" and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
You are absolutely right.
This would work in a city with competent health inspectors. And it would be a good thing.
Health inspections are notoriously open to interpretation. One person's hellish filth pit is another person's business as usual.
If the restaurant inspector's are as professional as the building inspectors are, this is doomed to failure. I've seen very good, conscientious inspectors, and then I've seen very lazy inspectors that did more than hint that this would go a lot easier if I'd compensate them for the troubles. Maybe more importantly, I've seen different inspectors make wildly different assessments of a situation, sometimes in direct contradiction of actual safety code.
Running a restaurant is already a very difficult business. Even more so know that people are saving $$ and eating at home.
The absolute last thing DC's restaurant industry needs is a poorly trained unprofessional group of inspectors that can arbitrarily decide who gets what grade.
I'd be all for this if I had any faith in DC's ability to run it.
But I don't.
Why bother with letter grades? Shouldn't every place be an "A"? Well, 85% of your customers didn't get sick, so that's a "B". Yeah, right.
The best thing the city can do is make health inspection records more accessible.
i agree with alweis, let's make the health inspection records more accessible first. if that doesn't satisfy consumers, then we can go for the gold with the rating system. i think an incrementalist approach here works well.
I believe they use this "grading system" in NYC with great results. And I think they take many, many factors into account before assigning a letter grade. And no, they aren't always As. Don't be so quick to judge this system. It's better than knowing basically nothing as you head into a restaurant now.
If a restaurant doesn't earn an "A" grade, then it shouldn't be in operation. I'm not saying a business should be necessarily shut down after a first inspection, but if the restaurant fails repeated inspections then it should just be shut down. There's no reason why people should be subject to anything less than "A" cleanliness at restaurants.
they do this in Louisville and the results are awesome...
Don't we have the worst schools in the known universe in this city? Shouldn't the human smegma on the DC City Council, who make full-time money for a part-time job, be a little more concerned about what's going on at DCPS central admin than in restaurant kitchens? I'm not saying that the City Council shouldn't do anything else until the schools are fixed, but they shouldn't be wasting time on stupid "Hey, we're just like NYC and LA!" legislation.
"Don't we have the worst schools in the known universe in this city? "
But, Rat, didn't you say I was unbelievably racist for making that very point?
It's ok if a black man says it but not ok for a white guy?
By the way, your posts on the WP advocating voting rights for DC were quite eloquent. Some of the best I've seen.
It depends on the connotation. If you're saying that DC's schools are the worst in the universe because they're filled with minority kids and run by a minority administration, then yes, you are being racist. If you're saying DC's schools are the worst because they're run by weak-kneed political timeservers in a corrupt school administration advocating flavor-of-the-month educational "theory" and who wouldn't know a dedicated public servant if it stood on a barstool and peed in theirfaces then, no, that's not racist. That's just disgusting. Which is how I feel whenever I read about kids not being given challenging work because "they come from a broken home" and it's unfair to give them difficult work because it might lower their self-esteem.
I mostly say DC schools suck because it's a make-work program, designed primarily to create and protect jobs for adults, mostly at the central administration level.
And that it's run like a private fiefdom, with the primary emphasis on protecting turf and job security.
And it's stunningly inept and inefficient. Wasting billions,while producing terrible results.
I don't care if it's run and populated by whites, blacks, gay Martians, giant animated mermaids with off-kilter cleavage and a taste for human flesh, whatever. It's a travesty, pure and simple.
But if a white guy points this out he's racist. That's really the only racial element I'd assign - a willingness by some to use race to deflect criticism.
"But if a white guy points this out he's racist. That's really the only racial element I'd assign - a willingness by some to use race to deflect criticism."
Maybe that's why the District has hired a rapidly aging Korean woman to solve all their school problems.
"Don't let her touch you, Captain Kirk!
That's how D'Amato died! Phasers won't stop her!"
"I am for Virginia is for Losers. Please, I must touch him."
Since welles got banned, the racist contingent at dcist dropped 98%. If you're looking for racist rants, roll on over to the wtopnews.com comment threads. They're blaming the bad weather on Marion Barry, traffic jams on illegal immigrants, and everything else on "Barak bin Laden."
"DON'T YOU MEAN BARAK BEEN LYIN!"
That wasn't me on WP.
For the record, I don't believe I called you a racist I said you have a lot of hostility towards Black people.
The letter-grade idea is a great one, and long overdue.
I read the health inspection citations for DC and VA each week in the Post's community Thursday sections, but I think I am the only one who does. It has saved me from eating at places with rodent/bug infestations and unsanitary conditions more than once.
There was a restaurant near my office in Chinatown (since closed) that was cited repeatedly over the years for critters and I would cringe whenever a co-worker ate there...
The Commonwealth of Virginia has an excellent website which lists all the restaurants and the latest health inspections. Here's an example:
http://www.healthspace.ca/Clients/VDH/Alexandria/Alexandria_Website.nsf
Of course the District won't even be able to come close to the frequency of inspections or the postings.
Let me save everyone some time: if you're eating in a restaurant, it's always unhealthy.
Even in the unlikely event that nobody in the kitchen is coughing/sneezing/bleeding/oozing, the prep chef isn't too busy to actually wash the bird-feces-encrusted organic salad greens, and the owner cares so little about profit that he actually serves you filtered water rather than the toxic lead solution that WASA sends to his tap -- even in this platonic ideal of sanitation, the chef is still going to put heart-stopping quantities of cheese, butter, heavy cream, lard, and salt on everything "to make it taste better."
Yeah, restaurant food tastes real good. Because it contains a metric buttload of the stuff that's terrible for you. You can't get the same taste at home, because no sane non-commercial cook would ever think to dump a pound of butter into a pot of mashed potatoes.