Raw Fish And Red Tape

by Tracy R. Walsh

Eveline Chao notes that health inspectors in major cities tend to come down hardest on ethnic eateries. For example, in New York City:

Chinatown’s 293 restaurants paid $600,000 in inspection-related fines from July 2012 to March 2013, versus $30.3 million paid citywide – a disproportionately high amount for such a small community, according to Rada Tarnovsky the president of Letter Grade Consulting (LGC), a company that helps restaurants navigate the grading scheme. … Chinatown is not the only community disproportionately affected by the grading system. A Huffington Post analysis found that the percentage of Chinese, Indian, Korean, Latin American, and African restaurants with grades below A hovered around the 30s. Worse, 54 percent of Pakistani restaurants and 58 percent of Bangladeshi restaurants scored as such. (It’s worth noting that Department of Health’s online food protection course is available only in English, Spanish, and Chinese.)

In addition to language barriers, Chao sees at root “a larger clash between tradition and bureaucracy”:

Elizabeth Meltz, Mario Batali’s food safety overseer, told the New York Times that she has dealt with inspectors who seemed unfamiliar with kimchi, which is literally spoiled cabbage but safe to eat. Raw fish is an issue in Japanese restaurants, as is glove wearing, or the lack thereof. Many chefs refuse to wear them, though they are required to, because the latex taste gets into the fish and it’s hard to do fine knife work in gloves. “There are some very clean sushi practices that will knock you from an A to a B, and if the chef is particularly inflexible about deviating from what they think is the best sushi in the world, you could have a really good sushi restaurant with a B,” said Dave Arnold, the food science expert. And kosher bakeries, for their part, get fined for food handlers without beard restraints.