NY City- has a grading system for food establishements- besides the fines, the grade is displayed in the window.
I recently reviewed the health inspection reports of a local market in Beacon Hill. The market failed 50% of their health inspections over a three year period. Unless you write City Hall and request the inspection reports, you would have no idea.
Boston needs a transparent system on health inspections. The city is already performaning the inspections- put the reports on line, and a grade for public display.
Please share widely!
…that establishments that fail health inspections get shut down. Is that not the case in Boston?
I don’t want to know that my local sub shop got a C or a B, I can tell they aren’t the Taj Mahal. Just shut down the ones that pose a public health risk, and let customers choose from the ones that don’t.
Seeing a grade on the window would make my food taste bad, even if it was an A. It’d just make me think they paid off the inspector or knew when the inspection was gonna be, or were the right shade.
I like Menino’s if it aint broke don’t fix it style. That’s why he keeps getting elected.
I read the report Bob linked to, and it appears to be working in New York City.
I guess I’d get used to it, and if I wanted to eat in a B or C I’d still be able to.
I’d be interested to see how many restaurants which got a “C” are still open a year later. Given that they made up 4% of the options, it’d be easy to avoid them, especially in NYC.
I think the number of different categories [in this case, 3] and the ratio in each category [69:15:4] is really important. Too few in the worst category and they may all go out of business. Too many and it may not be meaningful at all.
I try to avoid eating food from restaurants during flu season. Bad for the economy, I know. My thinking is this: Food prep and service people don’t get sick days, and aren’t paid enough to stay home without them. That means they’re going to work if they possibly can, sick or not. I’d rather not eat food prepared by sneezing, runny-nosed cooks, so I eat at home as much as possible during cold weather.
Food prep and wait staff should get sick days and be paid a living wage, but that’s not going to happen here soon. It would make dining out cost more, but since I already ration that, I could deal with it.
and can report that this program is working great. Even many seemingly-sketchy joints get “A”s, which is very comforting.
Which I suspect prompts an immediate shake-up and improved cleanliness. Fundamentally, people should be incentivized for good performance. Ratings do that. No ratings encourage slipshod performance and offer no incentive to improve. Worse, we’re already paying for the inspections. It’s a classic case of Boston/Menino resistance to change, to its own detriment.
… that almost all health inspections are subjective. Grading systems only work if inspectors from town to town, kitchen to kitchen use the exact same criteria in the exact same way. Allow me to say that they do not.
The intensity of inspections can vary wildly from inspector to inspector. As a certified Food Safety and Sanitation instructor, I can walk into the best kitchens in the world and find something wrong. In other cases I’ve seen awful kitchens get high marks for reasons I care not to speculate about. All inspectors have pet peeves that they will nail you on, regardless of the actual potential health hazard. And others have blind spots. Some inspectors will allow you to correct simple violations on the spot without a negative mark and others will write down every last detail. And believe it or not, sometimes there are political pressures from city hall. (shock! horror!)
The NYC program is likely fraught with inconsistencies and does little to actually promote safety. But I am sure that it has been used as a positive marketing tool by some restaurants and put others out of business, fairly or not.
I am a fan of “Pass/Fail” with a simpler critical vs non-critical violation report. If you really want something publicly posted, an average of the last several inspections would give a diner a much better sense of how the establishment performs rather than the latest report, which may have been a good or bad day for the minimum wage dishwasher who can single-handedly sink an entire restaurant when the inspector walks in.
Frequent random inspections do more to keep a place honest than an A, B or C.
Just my 2 cents after working in the industry since 1984.