Friday, February 6, 2009
Restaurants Keeping Score: How Clean Is Your Favorite Restaurant?
Posted by Carrington Fox on Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 6:03 AM
Ever since I toured the downtown restaurant circuit with a Metro health inspector, I have been intrigued by restaurant health scores. It's not that they're arbitrary, but they can be a little misleading. For example, I once saw a popular restaurant get docked major sanitation points because someone left a cell phone on the bar. And don't even think about storing your mop upside down. (Meanwhile, dead roaches? Not such a problem, because, well, they're dead, which means the bug killer is doing its job.)
I get it. There's a risk of cross-contamination from the cell phone to the food, and a mop won't dry properly if it's stored wrong. I'm just saying that if residential kitchens were held to such standards, Chez Fox would have been boarded up long ago. That is all just to say the big green health score on the wall of a restaurant may not mean exactly what you think. If you really care, you oughta look into the numbers.
There's a couple of ways to do that. Metro has long hosted a restaurant scores site. Now there's also cleanscores.com, which includes restaurants in Tennessee. So have fun checking these sites out, and if you find any particularly disgusting infractions, please keep us posted.
Comments (4)
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You're right -- it's in the details. I don't care if the aluminum foil is stored next to the window cleaner. Or if someone is drinking a coke in the kitchen. Or if there's not an air gap between the drain pipe and the floor.
But if the infraction is in The Big Three, I'm out of there: meat at the wrong temperature, wildlife in the kitchen, lack of hand-washing.
That said, Pink and I ate at a taco wagon in the fall of '07 that had, like, a 57 score. They didn't have a double sink, and the fridge was at about 45 degrees. It was good food, or interesting, anyway, and we lived to tell the tale.
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I've always thought they shouldn't be allowed to post the score in huge type while having the reality in fine print. People really should read the report before they make their decision. At one restaurant I worked at, we consistently lost points because our floor had some gouges in it from moving in equipment and ceiling tiles that were permanently stained. These items had nothing to do with actual cleanliness and would have cost thousands to repair, so we took the hit every time. One time, our owner was sweeping when the health inspector came in and asked to see her. She leaned the broom against the wall to see her, and when the health inspector saw it, we got docked points for that too.
I like health inspectors, because when they are doing their job, they help you to do your job better. I just think they should better inform the public what their reports actually say.
god forbid these guys ever went to europe. they'd shut down nearly every restaurant in spain, italy, belgium, portugal and france.
I think Metro's site is a near total dis-service, although I have referenced it for years. They do not list all places inspected in the given period of time, only the top and bottom scores. And as noted by everyone else, the story is in the comments, and those are absent for all but the major violations of the low scores.
and yes, you can get ALL inspection scores by visiting the state's site (http://tn.state.gegov.com/tennessee/), but again, no comments, and if it's a follow up/adjusted score, you don't know what was the original problem.
One place I lived there was pretty a much a one-to-one ratio between dollars exchanged and final score. That is not the case here by any means, but those scores by themselves are about as meaningful...
