Cover Story
photos by Eric England
The lunch crowd at Betty’s Grill off Charlotte Avenue is well into its blue plate special of beer and nicotine as Metro health inspector Pam Wilson peruses the low-ceilinged galley kitchen. She works quickly, practically holding her breath to keep from inhaling the tobacco haze billowing in the pass-through window from the bar, where dazed, unshaven men fill the stools, raising beer bottles, then cigarettes, then beer bottles, left, right, left, like a seated kickline of stoned Rockettes. With eyes raised reverently to a silent rebroadcast of NASCAR, Betty’s regulars hardly take notice of Wilson’s flashlight sweeping under the sticky refrigerator and up into the greasy hood of the stove.
Wilson’s pet peeve is sticky floors, she hates live roaches and she’ll embargo a carton of unlabeled fish as fast you can say, “foodborne contamination.” But cats in a bar really freak her out. So when she dredges what appears to be a cat-food bowl from the dish sink, her voice takes on an urgent tone. “Excuse me. Um, Betty,” Wilson calls into the bar. “I need to talk to you.”
An exasperated Betty Oliver stops clearing plates left over from breakfast and steps into the kitchen. There’s hardly room for the two women to stand face to face. Between her thumb and forefinger, Wilson gingerly holds the two-bowl dish, as if she has just recovered a murder weapon. “What is this?”
It’s a bowl Oliver uses to feed the cats.
“Do you feed the cats inside the bar?” Wilson asks.
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Despite a plastic jug of kibble labeled “Kitten” at her feet, Oliver insists the cats all stay out back. Unconvinced, Wilson exits onto the patio (a handwritten sign on the door reads, “Caution: Cat Crossing—Look”), where she meets the suspicious gaze of two felines.
“I don’t run upon this too often,” Wilson says, speed-dialing her supervisor back at Lentz Public Health Center. “We’ve got a situation here,” she says. After a quick exchange, Wilson hangs up the cell phone and explains that since we didn’t actually witness the cats inside, she can’t shut Betty’s down. All she can do today is record a critical violation of pet bowls in the sink.
Further scrutiny of Betty’s Grill reveals ragged linoleum floors, ashtrays full to the brim and the smell of urine. (The odor has nothing to do with the cats, Oliver assures Wilson; that’s just from when her customers go out back to pee.) But these insalubrious observations won’t impact the inspection. Wilson deducts a few points for the cat bowls, the lack of self-closing apparatus on the back door, grime in the fridge and food debris in the microwave, and Betty’s skates by with 88 points out of 100.
Inspector Gadget Flashlight, litmus strips and thermometer are Wilson’s tools of the trade.
Most restaurateurs know pets are forbidden, but if their tuna tenderloin isn’t labeled in the refrigerator, their chef is drinking soda over the stove, or their Windex bottle isn’t marked as cleanser, they better sure as hell hope Pam Wilson doesn’t come knocking. Armed with litmus strips, alcohol wipes, digital thermometer and flashlight—everything but a fine-tooth comb—Wilson pounds a beat of more than 380 restaurants, markets, shelters, day-care centers and schools to make sure food handlers are prepping, cooking, storing and serving food safely.
As I tag along with Wilson over a few weeks, she explains the intricacies of food science, the temperatures at which bacteria thrive and the risks of cross-contamination from server to customer. She tells a few horror stories, disses my favorite restaurants—especially the tantalizing $9 all-you-can-eat sushi lunch buffet at Ru San’s—and frankly is a real buzz kill about dining out.
But if I saw and smelled the same kitchens and back alleys that Wilson sees every day, I’m sure I’d prefer to eat at home, too.
Any score over 85 is considered good by the health department, but that’s not to say an 88 is an 88 is an 88. Betty’s, for example, was a lucky 88—really lucky—saved only because Wilson didn’t actually witness burly men pissing out back or lazy cats licking clean a bowl, or, God forbid, their private parts, inside the bar.
Across town and a world away, we enter the large, gleaming kitchen of newly opened Sambuca. Chef Stephen Shires greets Wilson, quick to show off the improvements his crew has made since her initial visit. Wilson is impressed by a Ziploc bag of ice covering the hard-boiled eggs that are waiting to be sliced. In her first inspection, Wilson deducted points because the eggs weren’t quite cold enough. “We learned our lesson,” the chef says, adding that of all the cities he has worked in, Nashville has the strictest health inspectors he has ever met. “Scary” is a word he uses. But today, Shires is on the good side of the law. In addition to a follow-up inspection score of 88, which Wilson says is very good for a new restaurant, she has her own compliment for Sambuca: as we leave, she looks around the luxe bar and dining room and whispers to me, “It makes me proud to say this is one of my places.”
In yet another example of the sublime-to-ridiculous diversity of the inspector’s job, the diminutive Wilson strides confidently into the Hustler Hollywood store on Church Street. She encourages me to look around as she speaks to the manager of the espresso bar, but I hang sheepishly near the cheesecakes and pastries, trying not to look interested in the jewel-colored candy Flick A Dicks, Tit Tarts and Hide-Away Penis Pops.
As Wilson pristinely pokes and prods her way through the snack bar, it’s not the oversize photos of women fingering their parts or the broad array of crotchless and studded attire that draws her scorn. She just averts her eyes. But she can’t ignore the fact that a spray bottle of Murphy’s Oil soap and water is not properly labeled. Nor the fact that the Splenda packets are stored alongside chemicals under the sink. But overall, Hustler’s a pretty clean place, and Wilson delivers the familiar yellow sheet marked with a bold green 95.
As we ride between restaurants, I ask Wilson about the places we’ve seen. “Would you eat at Betty’s?” No! “What about Sambuca?” Yes. “How about Hustler Hollywood?”
“No,” she says earnestly, “because I would never want to be seen there. People would be saying, ‘Look at that. There goes Deacon Wilson’s wife in the Hustler store!’ ”
One place where Wilson can be found after hours is the Samaritan Ministries shelter in Hadley Park, where she and her family volunteer with their church. Samaritan is also on her inspection beat, and when we arrive, the staff recognize and greet Wilson warmly, despite the fact that she is scrutinizing their Dumpster and back parking lot.
“Good morning, Mrs. Wilson.”
“Good morning, Miss Cook.”
As with every inspection, Wilson starts by washing her hands in the hand sink, where she quickly determines that the hot water—critical for sanitizing hands—is functioning and there are paper towels available.
The dish sinks are arranged improperly: they should be ordered wash, rinse, sanitizer. Wilson writes up the violation and speaks to the man in charge of the dish area. “Do you understand?” she asks in a tone that sincerely conveys that she is here to educate.
A group of homeless and elderly files in for the 11 o’clock lunch of chicken and dumplings, and Wilson goes to work with her flashlight, checking beneath counters and sinks for bugs or water leaks. She measures the alkalinity of water in the dishwasher and the temperature of dumplings on the stove. A large pot of leftover pinto beans in the walk-in refrigerator is unlabeled, which costs a point, but the refrigerator and freezer are well organized and tidy.
“Very neat, very clean this time,” she praises Cook.
“We’ve had some problems in the past,” explains Wilson, who has been on the Midtown-North Nashville beat for just over a year now, inspecting the shelter every six months. But the Samaritan crew has come to Wilson’s training classes at Lentz, and the education is paying off.
“She makes us do what we’re supposed to do, and we appreciate that,” Cook says.
In the storage area, Wilson kicks potato sacks to see if fruit flies swarm up. She writes up a few dented cans of apple juice and a moldy bottle of vinaigrette, then heads to the front door, where ragged men continue to shuffle in for the warm lunch. Wilson greets a man in line for the bathroom and stands with him for a few minutes. When he finally gives up on the locked door and heads toward the dumplings, Wilson asks politely but firmly, “Now, don’t you want to wash your hands first?” She encourages him to keep waiting, though it could be a while—you never know what might be happening in the bathroom at a shelter, she acknowledges.
“I always encourage them to wash their hands,” she says. “We have to take care of our less fortunate members of society, because if they become sick from lack of access to facilities to properly hand-wash and are working while ill, they could have an effect on the general public.”
Restaurant after restaurant, bar after bar, hand-washing is something Wilson takes very seriously. When a server clears dirty dishes and returns to food prep, Wilson wants to see him wash his hands. When a dishwasher reaches down to pull his low-riders up over his butt crack, he needs to hit the sink. When a kitchen worker goes out for a smoke, she better soap up when she returns. And Wilson will wait in the cold—just out of sight—to see if they do the right thing. She’ll deduct points if they don’t.
At a lunchtime inspection of Golden Coast Chinese restaurant on West End Avenue, Wilson motions to owner Yun Feng Yeh to hold out his hands. She examines his palms as if inspecting for gunshot residue. When she sees a bandage on his knuckles, she scolds him. “If you have a bandage on your hand, you can keep working, but you gotta wear a glove. Do you understand?”
But that’s one of the only things Wilson finds wrong with the family-owned restaurant. Her flashlight reveals a couple dead roaches on the shelves, but the thing about roaches, Wilson says, “if they’re dead, it’s not a critical violation.”
Yeh’s wife and co-owner Annie shrieks when she sees the dried insects feet-up among her utensils. “You going to write that down?” she asks coyly.
“Of course I’m going to write that down! Get outta here!” Wilson barks, teasing Yeh, who hovers anxiously over the inspection, eyes glued to Wilson’s clipboard. Since the Yehs have an active pest control contract, the insects cost them only a couple points, and they end up with a 96, par for the course for the consistently clean restaurant.
“Golden Coast is the only Chinese place I’ll eat at,” Wilson says, and, as if to prove the point, when we walk out to the steam tables in the dining room, her colleagues from the health department are tucking into plates of moo goo gai pan and lo mein.
Later, Wilson tells me a story about a real roach problem. A couple years ago, she was inspecting a Thai restaurant—now long gone—when she shone her flashlight on a single roach. Roaches seldom come alone, so she followed it to see if there were more where it came from. The bug scuttled under a crate where an older member of the staff sat peeling vegetables, and Wilson nudged the box aside. Suddenly, “a Red Sea of roaches” parted and began running toward her. “I was up on that box calling the office on my cell phone. I was screaming, ‘They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere! We gotta shut it down! We gotta shut it down!’ ” she recalls with great animation.
“They were albino roaches. I had never seen anything like it, but you know that woman peeling vegetables? She didn’t even move, and you know what that says to me? She was used to them!”
Between the roaches and an urban-legend-worthy story about mouse droppings Wilson found in some Mexican rice, it’s no surprise that she’s finicky about where she eats. “You’re always on duty as a restaurant inspector,” says Wilson, who has been known to flash a badge when there’s no hot water in a place she and her family are dining. That attitude explains why, when I suggest we break for lunch at Ru San’s, she looks at me as if I have just suggested we go back to Betty’s Grill and lick a couple of cat bowls. Ru San’s has failed Wilson’s last three inspections, with scores below 75, and risks being shut down if it doesn’t show immediate improvement.
For the most part, Wilson sticks to fast-food places like Captain D’s and White Castle. She counts on the frying process to kill any bacteria left from faulty food prep. She also figures “if the food is fried, chances are they’re not going to touch it. I’ve got a thing about people putting their hands on my food.”
For now, we compromise and head to Otter’s Chicken Tenders on Demonbreun. Despite Wilson’s advice, I order a salad, a veritable hot zone in her eyes. She bravely orders chicken, grilled, not fried. When I ask her if she’s nervous, she says, “No, they do a good job here.” Wilson gave Otter’s a 93 in the fall. We take our trays and head to the self-serve counter to get utensils. Fortunately, this time Otter’s forks are all pointing the same direction, reducing the chance of a customer touching the tines of one when grabbing for the handle of another. It takes me a second to spot the napkins, which are neatly stored in dispensers mounted on the wall. I remark that I’ve never seen that before. It looks like a good idea. “Yep,” Wilson says. “That’s probably because I suggested they do that.”
A couple weeks later, Wilson and I head out again, this time for a reinspection of Ru San’s. In a last-ditch effort to keep the popular Gulch spot from being temporarily shut down, she has hosted a bilingual food-handling workshop to make sure the staff actually know what is expected of them.
“On any given day, anyone can fail an inspection, whether they are a mom-and-pop or a chain,” Wilson says. What’s critical is that people understand the science behind the hygiene, why proteins have to stay hot or cold—but not in between—to prevent bacteria, why dented cans must be thrown away to avoid risk of botulism, why long hair must be restrained and fingernails trimmed.
As Wilson paces the busy cook’s line, between the tempura fryer and the rice steamer, the loyal lunch crowd lines up on the sidewalk, ready for all they can eat. She rubs some sushi rice on a litmus strip and measures a pH of 4.0. That’s fine. She jabs a thermometer into a slab of tuna. It’s cooler than 45 degrees. That’s fine. The tuna tenderloins are labeled from a reputable wholesaler. Fine. No one is drinking on the line, which would risk cross-contamination from mouth to cup to hand to food. Fine.
But there is a cell phone sitting on top of a food container on the counter, which does present a risk of cross-contamination. A couple of mops are touching the floor, a bottle of cleanser is still unlabeled, the utensils aren’t in line and a T-shirt is wadded up near some food product.
All in all, though, the team has shown marked improvement. In a restaurant known for its boisterous clapping and greeting of customers, Wilson gathers the staff and tells them they all deserve a clap themselves. She gives them an 87 and warns that she’ll be back within a month to make sure they keep it up. “Do you understand?”
As the lunch crowd pours in, Wilson and I head next door to inspect newly opened Watermark. “That was a whole lot better,” she says, looking through the window at the crowded Ru San’s buffet. “If I actually liked sushi, I’d eat here today.”