Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Mike Mayo’s Eat Beat
Restaurant law is letter perfect.
Walk into a restaurant in New York, and you’ll see a sign in the window with a letter grade: A, B or C. Since 2010, the city has had a grading system tied to health inspections. Restaurants are required to post their latest ratings in their front windows. Eateries that score well get A’s. Eateries with numerous or severe violations are given a chance to fix problems, and if they don’t score high on unannounced follow-up inspections, they get a B or the dreaded C.
“How come we don’t have that in Florida?” my 11-year-old daughter asked on a recent visit. Good question. The grading system is a simple, effective way to summarize inspection results and inform the public about information that is available online. And it’s a way to influence restaurants to change behavior and improve cleanliness, safety and food-handling practices. Los Angeles instituted a grading system way back in 1998. Las Vegas has done it since 2002. Other places are considering it.
A letter-grading system is overdue in Florida, but don’t expect our lawmakers to work up an appetite for it. An effort to bring restaurant grades to the state failed to get through the Legislature in 2007.
“I’d welcome it,” says Joey Esposito, the owner of Café Seville in Fort Lauderdale. His restaurant routinely passes inspections with only minor blemishes, which would translate to A’s under New York’s rating system. “If we had to post a sign with our grade at the door, that wouldn’t bother me one bit.”
But it apparently bothers many legislators and some powerful players in the restaurant industry, which formally opposed the effort a decade ago.
The Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association still opposes any grading system.
“Reducing the myriad details of an inspection to a summary is a step backward in public information,” FRLA president Carol Dover said this week in an email statement. “Further, grades fail as a consumer purchasing tool. The speed and dynamics of food service mean conditions may have no resemblance — for better or worse — to the inspection grade, and subsequently do not provide reliable purchasing information.”
You know what I think when I hear claptrap like that? That I’d rather stay home and not eat out. But many tourists and elderly snowbirds who flock to Florida each year have no choice but to put themselves at the mercy of restaurant kitchens. Too bad the state’s most influential restaurant trade association would rather keep them in the dark.
The industry’s opposition is a shame, because New York’s experience shows that the system works. It benefits consumers, public health and the restaurant industry, which is as robust as ever in New York. In the first year of New York’s grading system, 65 percent of restaurants received A’s. Now, that number is up to nearly 90 percent, with 21,500 of the city’s 24,000 eateries getting the highest ranking. Consumer complaints about unsanitary conditions and cases of foodborne illnesses have dropped, according to follow-up studies done by the city.
In other words, faced with public shame and opprobrium, restaurants have found a way to clean up their acts fast. Or as restaurant consultant Rada Tarnovsky told the New York Times in 2015, “You can’t survive with a B on your window. You have to have an A. [In New York] you can just cross the street to eat at an A place.”
The dining public doesn’t take too kindly to C restaurants in New York. There are currently only 200 in the city, according to the latest statistics, less than 1 percent. It takes a concerted effort to earn that scarlet letter, because eateries are given a chance to take corrective action and get a better grade if they perform poorly on the initial inspection.
Even without a grade system, Florida diners are getting more information at their fingertips. Last month, Yelp, the popular crowdsourced review app, added data about restaurant inspections to its site. Under the heading “Health Score,” it truncates an eatery’s latest inspection results to “pass” or “fail,” a concise and somewhat misleading label. The app doesn’t provide specifics about inspections and doesn’t note that those who “fail” are given time to take corrective action on noncritical violations and have been deemed safe to remain open.
“The data is sitting in .gov servers that few people ever visit,” Luther Lowe, vice president of public policy for Yelp, told the Tampa Bay Times last month. "We believe that data should be out in the open for everyone to see.” Full inspection reports are available on the state’s website at MyFloridaLicense.com.
Unlike many places, where restaurant inspections are conducted by city or county agencies, Florida has a statewide inspection system overseen by the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Nearly 200 inspectors visit each of Florida’s 40,772 licensed restaurants at least once a year, performing more than 140,000 inspections, including follow-up visits. Inspectors have the authority to shut eateries for critical violations that endanger public health and safety, such as rodent or roach infestations.
Roaches trigger a big “ick” response, but health experts and restaurateurs say food temperature and handling are the most critical factors when it comes to health and safety. Bacteria and pathogens can spread quickly if eggs, meat or seafood isn’t refrigerated properly. “The first thing the inspectors always do is get their thermometers out,” Cafe Seville’s Esposito says.
In New York, the grading system assigns points to inspection violations — one point for minor infractions, seven points or more for critical ones. Restaurants that score 13 points or lower get A’s; those that score 14 to 27 points get B’s; and those with 28 or more points get C’s. Restaurants that flunk initial inspections or get shut for critical violations and then get cleared to reopen must post “grade pending” signs until an unannounced reinspection is done.
Florida’s inspectors do a laudable job, and their inspection reports are thorough. It’s time we crunch and post their findings at restaurant entrances, where the dining public can see them. As New York has shown, it’s as easy as A, B and C.