The New York City Council will announce Wednesday that nearly 1,000 restaurant operators have responded, after only two weeks, to a Web survey seeking their views about the city health department’s new letter-grading system for food safety.

As of Tuesday, 965 responses had been submitted — a sign “that we’ve hit a nerve,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker. “We’re getting surveys from every borough, and from very diverse neighborhoods.”

Opinions expressed in the responses will be revealed in Council hearings scheduled for late February or early March. Responding to what the speaker said was “a wave of complaints” about letter grading, the Council posted a questionnaire on its Web site (www.council.nyc.gov) asking the city’s 24,000 restaurateurs to share information about their experiences with inspectors and administrative tribunals, and the cost of fines and inspection consultants.

Susan Craig, a department spokeswoman, said a survey last summer showed that 90 percent of New Yorkers approved of letter grading, and questioned the methodology and the validity of the Council questionnaire, which asks for but does not require the names of respondents. “The survey has no method of confirming that a participant is actually a restaurant, nor does it ensure that an entrant fills out only one submission,” Ms. Craig said. “The results — good or bad — will have negligible value.”

But Zoe Tobin, a Council spokeswoman, responded that “there is a vetting system in place” that checks for duplication and fraud. “We felt that anonymity was important to encourage candid responses,” she said.

A survey response rate of 4.2 per cent sorta sucks and isn’t representative of much.

Chicago retailers that sell pre-packaged foods and recently inspected restaurants with no history of foodborne illness would police themselves and send inspection reports to City Hall, under a “self-certification” plan advanced Tuesday to free inspectors to focus on “high-risk” establishments.

I don’t care who does the inspection or has oversight, as long as the data is made public. And why not market those food safety efforts to reward good performers and further create a culture of accountability within an operation.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan, approved by the City Council’s Committee on Budget and Government Operations, would apply to roughly 2,500 of the city’s 15,000 licensed food establishments.

The group would include grocery stores, gas stations and other “low-risk” stores that primarily sell beverages and pre-packaged foods and engage in minimal handling or preparation of food.
Self-certification would also be open to restaurants that have passed inspections in the prior year, have not been closed for food safety issues for 36 months and “not implicated as a source of foodborne outbreak” in the past three years.

“If you are a food establishment that has a stellar record, has been doing a great job and has not failed inspections, there’s no reason we can’t work with you to ensure that you are continuing to do that work on your own,” Health Commissioner Dr. Bechara Choucair said Tuesday.

Choucair noted that the city code currently requires the Department of Public Health to inspect food establishments “at least once every six months, regardless of risk” and mobile food dispenser vehicles that serve ice cream, frozen desserts and milk once every 90 days months during the season.

That’s a tall order, considering the fact that department has just 32 field inspectors.

“There was one woman—it was a VIP tasting menu, I remember this: She just threw up on the table, in the middle of an extended tasting menu. They cleaned it up, and she “boot-and-rallied.” She finished the meal.”

That’s what one staffer told Christine Whitley of New York Magazine about the experiences in fancy-pants New York restaurant, Per Se.

“We can accommodate wacky people, and for the most part, 95 percent of the guests are well behaved. Then you have the couple that goes and has sex in the bathroom—that happens quite a lot. You have people who throw up—they throw up a lot. … You see people cheating on their spouses, overhear bits of conversation. …

"Spitting in the food doesn’t happen in New York restaurants. Honestly, people wouldn’t do that to the food. At Per Se, the cooks work 70 or 80 hours a week and make next to nothing, but they work because they want to cook. And to do that to something, to spit in prep work that someone has spent eight hours of work on—blood, sweat, and tears and all—it’s just not done. And if something drops on the floor, it gets thrown away. With the recent Department of Health crackdowns, those letter grades are bought—by that, I mean every restaurant that has an A has either an in-house specialist or a specialist they’ve hired. Before the DOH inspections, every high-end restaurant has four or five in-house inspections, and then everyone has their own set of fire drills—you put on hats and gloves when the inspector comes, you hide things away. …

“The staff is incestuous. I think half the staff is dating the other half of the staff right now. I mean, you spend 60 hours a week with these people, so what do you think is going to happen?”

Pete Snyder told the Chicago Tribune he's not a fan of publishing the results of spot inspections online because "there is no evidence that posting does any good."

Instead, he favors a system where employees are trained by food service managers in controlling safety hazards, then demonstrate their mastery of the procedures to an inspector.

"This is the only effective full-control program," said Snyder, founder of the Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management in St. Paul, Minn. "The reason inspectors don't do this and (instead) simply inspect for things is because it takes too long."

What evidence is there that Pete’s program does any good?

What evidence is there that all those food safety messages repeated ad nauseam, especially during the holidays, do any good? (None)

What evidence is there food safety training programs do any good? (it’s mixed, but fairly lousy; more on that in a month).

In Sept.. 2007, my friend Frank was running food safety things at Disney in Orlando, and asked me to visit and speak with his staff.

“Doug, I want you to talk about food safety messages that have been proven to work, that are supported by peer-reviewed evidence and lead to demonstrated behavior change,” or something like that.

I said it would be a brief talk.

There was nothing – nothing – that could be rigorously demonstrated to have changed food safety behavior in any group, positive or negative. Everything was about as effective as those, ‘Employees must wash hands’ signs.

Chapman finally showed a food safety message can be translated into better food safety practices at food service; but that took direct video observation. After exposure to food safety infosheets, cross-contamination events went down 20 per cent, and handwashing attempts went up 7 per cent. We controlled for various factors as best we could.

Pete is right in that “there’s no evidence that posting does any good” but only because there’s no evidence that most things do any good.

I want to figure out how to best collect evidence that is compelling and meaningful, right or wrong.

We’ve reviewed the literature, we’ve trialed a disclosure program in New Zealand, and compiled a lot of anecdotal evidence from restaurant patrons and managers who say public disclosure of inspection grades keeps everyone awake. It can’t be linked to lower or higher rates of foodborne illness, despite some attempts to do so, but public disclosure does seem to insert some consideration of microbial food safety into a national conversation of food that is dominated by porn.

I haven’t figured out how to measure that.

Snyder did say that a restaurant with multiple, back-to-back failed inspections is "an indication the manager isn't paying attention."