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New York Restaurants to be Graded for Cleanliness

  • Heidee
  • March 25, 2010

Will your favorite restaurant make the grade?On Tuesday, the New York City Board of Health voted, with 6-to-2 vote with one abstention, to publicly display its nearly 25,000 restaurants’ health inspection ratings. Starting July 2010, customers will not have to check online but be able to see the restaurants’ prominently displayed inspection grades – a blue A, a green B or a yellow C on an 8-by-10-inch inspection placard with their date. The lower the grade, the more often the restaurant will be inspected, a bump up from the current system, wherein inspection is only done once a year.

This plan was proposed 14 months ago by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the one who came up with the Golden Apple Award, a completely voluntary initiative that recognizes establishes that have maintained excellent safety practices by giving them a certificate and a door decal (the current title holders are Churrascaria Plataforma, Artuso Pastry Shop, Dos Caminos Soho, Executive Conference Center, Ocean Grill and Shake Shack) . But while the Golden Apple initiative is completely voluntary and non-participation will not affect a restaurant’s legal ability to operate, the new food-safety program will be enforced on all restaurants.

There were some negative reactions to this move. Robert Bookman, legislative counsel for the New York City chapters of the New York State Restaurant Association, claimed that “letter grading will be more misleading than helpful,” and “it will be unfair and a black eye to this industry in the restaurant capital of the world” George Kravitz, spokesman for Staten Island Chamber of Commerce, poetically decried the grades as “a scarlet letter that will keep people from eating out” Marc Murphy, chef and owner of Landmarc Restaurant in TriBeCa, exclaimed that “showing customers this arbitrary inspection grade doesn’t tell the public anything, because it is a snapshot in time.”He even went so far as to draft a statement to the New York Times about the issue, stating: “My biggest concern about letter grading, in fact, is simply that I’m not at all sure the grades are going to be based solely on food safety and, ultimately, the safety of the customer. Is it fair that a restaurant with a non-food related violation such as a leaky faucet or a burned-out light bulb receive the same letter grade as a restaurant with a far more serious food-related violation? Isn’t this going to be harmful to small businesses that might suffer a lower grade due to penalties that are not related to food safety at all?”

But the restaurant association has lobbied the health department to exempt all nonfood-related violations from the letter-grade calculation. Dan Katz, the department’s acting commissioner for environmental health, confirmed that the department had agreed not to base letter grades on many such issues.

Elliott S. Marcus, an associate health commissioner, stated that the specifics of the new regulations could be released as early as next week. For now, though, he said that restaurants receiving an A grade can post their mark at the end of the inspection. If the grade is lower than an A, the restaurant can wait until a second review by a different inspector within a month that would permit a letter change. At that point, if an operator contests the grade, the restaurant can post a “grade pending”sign until management can present its case before a judge at a health department administrative tribunal.

This is a first for New York, but it has already been in place in Los Angeles for more than a decade and according to a 2007 study by the country’s Department of Public Health, 91% of the people approved of the program. Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, director of public health for Los Angeles County, said an independent study showed that this system had not only reduced food-borne illness outbreaks associated with restaurants, but also had lowered associated hospitalizations by 20%. The number of A-grade restaurants climbed to 83% in 2007, from 40% in 1998, and revenues increased in those restaurants.

With such positive statistics, we are optimistic that this grading system can only have a good effect on New York. If schools didn’t have grades, students wouldn’t even bother to study, so implementing a grading system on restaurants will keep them in line all the time because who wants to be slapped with a failing grade, emblazoned for the world to see?

How about you, do you agree with this move? Once it’s implemented, would you only dine in the A’s? Please voice out your opinions in the comments section.

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