For Mr. Gold, as for many New Yorkers, the letter-grading system instituted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 19 months ago has wormed its way into the subconscious.
Since the beginning of the grading system, which requires all city restaurants to display placards with the sanitary grade issued by health inspectors, traffic on the Health Department’s restaurant inspection site has gone from 10,000 hits per month to 124,000. A soon-to-be-launched app is expected to drive that number up sharply. And while there is no hard evidence as to how a restaurant’s grade affects its business, all that traffic means that people out there — lots of people — are paying attention.
And grades aren’t just for dinner anymore: at CityStore, the city’s “official store,” “Grade A”-branded products of all sorts — aprons, mugs, potholders, baby bibs and onesies — have been hot items. I guess for a lot of us onetime grade-hounds, the thrill of an A+ never quite goes away.
Of course, for restaurateurs, judgment can sting. One result of the grading system is that, in the wake of a less-than-stellar initial inspection, subsequent inspections — and, inevitably, fines — are likely to follow. The chance to improve is built into the system; similar programs in other cities don’t include an immediate do-over. But it can feel to restaurant owners like harassment. There is also, of course, the distressing prospect of losing business. One cafe owner in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who has never had anything but an “A” or a “grade pending,” said she nevertheless felt vulnerable: Obtaining a “B” or a “C” — though they are passing grades — “would allow competitors a chance to criticize the business.”
Why mark a restaurant with a “B,” or, God forbid, the dreaded “C”? Isn’t that like placing a scarlet letter on the place?
Well, exactly. “Do I expect people to see a mediocre grade and decide, ‘Hmm, I’m going to think twice about this’? Yes!” says Daniel Kass, a deputy health commissioner for environmental health. “Only incredible inattentiveness results in a C grade.”
When the grade system was first announced, I, in my contrarianism, swore to eat fearlessly, perhaps even exclusively, at “C”-graded restaurants. I had some romantic notions that the best, most authentic food could emerge only from kitchens not polished to an antiseptic shine — and that armed with my iron stomach and enlightened mind, I would march into divey joints in the far-flung corners of the five boroughs and experience exotic flavors and spiritual sustenance my more fastidious dining counterparts would forever miss out on.
It didn’t happen like that. Those glorious hole-in-the-wall places so beloved to us food types are doing just fine. A spin around the restaurant inspection site confirms that your favorite lousy Chinese joint or Uzbek cafe is scoring just as well as the critics’ darlings. (Per Se’s grade is pending.) In fact, about 72 percent of the city’s restaurants are posting “A” grades; of those, more than 60 percent earned “A’s” on the first inspection. It turns out it’s actually a challenge to find a “C” restaurant at which to tempt fate.
But they do exist. In fact, there are four in my neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens. My husband and I have turned to one of them, Five Star Banquet, for years for our greasy, late-night Indian food fix.
I didn’t imagine that the truth would affect my enjoyment of Five Star’s saag and samosas. Then I looked up the inspection details online: “Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas … Food contact surface not properly washed, rinsed and sanitized after each use … Facility not vermin proof … Toilet facility not maintained.”
I found myself sniffing for traces of Lysol, examining those black specks scattered on the naan with new trepidation. The food tasted the same as ever, I have never gotten sick, but that “C” grade, it turns out, was a gateway for me. I’d never asked for a virtual peek into Five Star’s kitchen, never thought I wanted one, but now that I’d seen it, I couldn’t un-see it. The bloom was off the jasmine rice.
At a subsequent compliance inspection, one month later, the situation at Five Star Banquet had improved significantly. No critical violations, and but a skittering mention of vermin. They are due for another graded inspection soon. I hope they keep it clean over there. I probably wouldn’t entirely give up on their butter chicken either way, but it will go down much easier once the scarlet letter has been scoured away.
Julie Powell is the author of “Julie Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.”
