Good job in theory, Boston: weak effort in practice. Globe:
Early next year, diners in Boston will get a new tool to learn how clean a restaurant is — a city-issued letter grade rating the establishment’s food safety practices. For the first year of the new initiative, a letter grade — either an A, B, or C — would be posted online only. But if the rollout goes smoothly, the grades would be displayed in storefront windows of every restaurant in Boston, resembling the systems that New York, Los Angeles, and other cities have been using since as early as the late 1990s.
As the newspaper argues in an editorial: the grades should be posted in hard copies at the front of every restaurant, just as they have been for years in NYC:
[T]he pilot program that Boston is scheduled to launch in early 2016 won’t be of much practical use initially, because the grades will only be available online. Physical signs on-site indicating a restaurant’s level of cleanliness won’t be required until some as-yet-undetermined date. Realistically, few diners are going to search the city’s online database for restaurant inspectionsbefore choosing where to eat.
Every municipality in the Commonwealth should adopt this — and every elected official should propose a mandate for a similar practice if they know what is good for them: it is supported by an overwhelming majority of voters (even if dirty restaurants don’t like the idea much).
Disclaimer: my daughter and her husband are each professional chefs
This approach has been a disaster in NYC, and has every likelihood of being the same in Boston. It is little more than another channel for graft, perhaps becoming more needed in Boston as public exposure constrains the existing liquor license and taxi medallion graft revenue streams.
Health inspection of restaurants is both necessary and hard. It requires competent and well-trained inspectors who understand both public health and the realities of a real restaurant kitchen.
My daughter and her husband worked in top-end New York restaurants for two years, returning to the Boston area early this year. Here is the reality of this in New York:
– Health inspectors are untrained minimum-wage workers who arrive with a clipboard and checklist. They lack the expertise, time, and incentives to actually understand what they see.
– Each actual inspection is a game with the rules understood by both sides. Virtually every restaurant has a buzzer system, not unlike the silent alarm systems used in banks, so that the host can alert the kitchen when an inspector arrives. Upon an “alert”, the kitchen staff performs the frequently-practiced “inspection drill” (the kitchen, too, has a checklist). When the kitchen is ready for inspection (while the host stalls the inspector with small talk), most of the kitchen staff moves to planned “staging areas” (such as a walk-in refrigerator, back alley, or basement storage room) so that the remaining staff meets all the required checklist items.
– Inspectors and their supervisors are readily responsive to off-the-record financial arrangements. Most restaurants get the “grade” they are willing to pay for. Many inspections are conducted on pre-arranged schedules worked out between restaurant owners and inspection staff. The real losers in this system are small restaurants who can’t afford to pay the graft.
– The resulting “grades” are meaningless. Any professional chef (all are trained in food safety procedures) can walk into any “A”-rated restaurant and immediately identify multiple violations.
One reason why restaurants in Cambridge and Somerville are actually already in better shape than their NYC counterparts is that each of those towns already has skilled and competent inspectors who know what they’re doing, know what to look for, and already do an excellent job.
In practice, dirty restaurants prefer this approach, as do local franchises of large-scale chains where little actual COOKING is done in the kitchen.
I think the political/economic agenda that motivates this proposal is well worth investigating. Like standardized testing in schools, the “cure” is likely to be far worse than whatever disease it purports to address.
Boston does not have a “dirty restaurant” problem. It has, instead, a dirty government problem.
…that Boston is going to emulate, rather than learn from and improve upon, the negative aspects of the NYC system? Seems inspections are already being done, but the results will be made more public and easy to understand. Maybe Boston will in fact use competent inspectors like Cambridge and Somerville.
The thread-starter cites this quote (emphasis mine):
If the domain were education, and the proposal were to introduce standardized testing “resembling the systems that … have been using”, I’m not sure our educators would be mollified by assurances that we will “learn from” the “negative aspects” of other standardized testing programs.
It seems to me that any proposal to post a “grade” requires somebody to decide what that grade is. That, in turn, requires establishing criteria to differentiate the letter grades — the system only makes sense if an “A” in one restaurant has some known relationship to a “B” in another.
I’d REALLY like to know what problem this solution is attempting to solve.
…but that refers to the system of transparency. Your concern seems to be about how the grades are determined, which I did not see an obvious connection to.
This sounds suspiciously like “don’t try to regulate something, because some people will be corrupt, and others will find a way to beat the system.” This is the argument against any time of inspection, or really any type of law. I’m not convinced that just because it can be gamed, it’s not worth doing.
This is an argument against changing a system that already works, not an argument against health inspections.
We already have a restaurant health inspection system that works. There is nothing here that describes what problems it purports to solve, other than snarky references to “dirty restaurants”.
It seems to me that a similarly unmanaged and unfocused rush to embrace standardized testing in education has not turned out well. I think we should avoid making a similar mistake here.
I’d like the proponents to describe the problems they propose to address before imposing an alleged “solution” to them. What are the shortcomings of the current restaurant inspection system, and how will the proposed replacement address them?