Restaurant Operations Watch: Making the grade — visibleRestaurant Operations Watch: Making the grade — visible

A photo taken by an Allegheny County Health Department inspector shows a window consumer alert placard hidden by a potted plat at Chinatown Inn. Photo: Allegheny County Health Department

As more local governments require restaurants and other foodservice operations to post letter, number or color-coded grades from health department inspections, operators are learning that compliance is the better course of action.

Two recent cases in Pennsylvania and Hawaii provide operational lessons for why complying with the rules is a wise choice.

In August, a Pittsburgh restaurant was fined for concealing its less-than-perfect-score placard behind a potted plant. And this week, Hawaiian authorities enforced a new food-safety placard state law by fining an udon restaurant $11,000 for taking down the required sign.

In July, Chinatown Inn in Pittsburgh was inspected and given a yellow Consumer Alert decal, to be prominently posted on its front window, for a string of serious food safety violations.

The Allegheny County Health Department said the restaurant’s owner, in an effort to hide the warning from customers, strategically placed potted plants in front of the window sign. The department discovered the cover-up and issued an $800 fine.

“That’s a very egregious violation,” Jim Thompson, deputy director of environmental health for the department, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

On Monday, the Hawaii Department of Health said it had fined an udon restaurant at Ala Moana Center in Honolulu $11,000 for removing a negative inspection placard from its window.

Iyo Udon received a yellow card, called a “conditional pass,” that allowed it to continue to operate, but warned customers that inspectors had found food safety violations. In the Hawaiian system, a red placard indicates closure for a restaurant.

The health department said an inspector posted the yellow placard at Iyo Udon on Aug. 22. A manager removed it and the health inspector noticed, said Janice Okubo, a department spokeswoman. By Aug. 25, the placard was replaced.

The food safety placards are putting pressure on Hawaiian restaurant owners, said several operators interviewed by Hawaii News Now.

"It's a good thing in one way, but at the same time, it's gonna [sic] hurt a lot of businesses," said Suman Basnet, who owns an Indian restaurant on Oahu.

Hawaii News Now said that out of the 6,000 eateries on Oahu, the Hawaii State Department of Health has inspected about 500. Of those, nearly 150 received a yellow conditional pass, meaning they had two or more critical violations. The department says 95 percent of restaurants fixed their issues to earn a green "Pass" placard. No restaurants received red placards.

“The law says that once we post the placard, the facility is not to mark, deface, hide, take down or camouflage the placard in any way. The whole idea is to notify the public what the inspection results were at the facility,” said Peter Oshiro, a department spokesman.

In the Iyo Udon case, the restaurant was cited for improper employee health and hygiene violations, including employees not properly their washing hands, hand washing conducted in sinks reserved for food preparation, hand washing sinks blocked and inaccessible, no soap or paper towels available at hand washing areas, ready-to-eat foods not protected from cross-contamination by raw uncooked foods, and no sanitizer used to disinfect dishes.

Inspectors said the new system is working and they are already making their rounds to neighboring islands.

U.S. restaurants face fewer violations of the sort recently discovered in the freezer of a Sussex restaurant in the United Kingdom: the body of a dead lion.
 

The animal's corpse was discovered stuffed next to food that was to be served to customers. The restaurant's owner told health inspectors the lion was donated to him by a nearby zoo to feed to his pack of dogs, the Mirror reported.

Ian Brightmore, health protection manager at Chichester District Council in West Sussex, told the newspaper, “Because the lion was kept in a place where food for human consumption was stored, of course we had to take action.”

Since the lion was the restaurant’s only health code violation, it was allowed to continue operating as usual.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
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