Every Friday, Roots in Alpharetta features an article on food and dining in a series I like to call Foodie Friday.
(Allow me the opportunity to rant on the topic of health scores today. I am also going to make an example out of BB’s Bagels. It is a perfect case study.)
They are hard to miss. Those single page inspection reports that are supposed to be posted in a conspicuous place near the entrance of a restaurant. Do you pay attention to them? Many times I don’t… unless they are unusually low.
The inspection scores you see in restaurants are based on a bunch of guidelines set forth by the state of Georgia. I’m not here to argue the nuisances of the rules themselves. I’m sure they are not foolproof. They are, however, geared towards preventing food-borne illness, something I don’t care to come in contact with.
The reviews themselves are conducted at the county level, and most county health departments post these scores on their own websites. This is problem number one. As a blogger who sometimes writes about food, I’d like to have the ability to search for restaurants who have recently received lower scores. This is next to impossible for a couple of reasons.
Take Forsyth County for example. Their health department will post an alphabetical listing of every restaurant. So if you want to know how the Subway sandwich shop near you scored on their most recent inspection, it is easy. If you want to find the lowest score in the county, you’re manually downloading hundreds of PDF files. Not exactly my idea of fun blog research.
Fulton County is a little better… sort of. If you’re feeling like a masochist you can download the 328 page PDF file of every restaurant in this giant county. Sounds like a gold mine of information, right? Not really. Their latest version of this only goes as recent as October 2009, four months old. On the flip side, they show several past reviews of each restaurant. But their list only shows the number and letter grade, not the full inspection report.
The second reason why it is hard for me to blog about health inspections is because of the follow-up inspection. Restaurants that receive a low grade are allowed to correct the problem and receive a follow-up inspection. This is good in a way because a restaurant has the opportunity to fix problems immediately. The bad part of this is that the follow-up review is often nearly perfect and evidence of the poor review practically disappears.
Let me give an example… BB’s Bagels on McFarland Parkway in Forsyth County. Before I begin, let me say that I absolutely love BB’s. I eat there more often than I care to admit. If you go to the Forsyth County health department webpage and look up their recent review, you’ll find this:
An 89 – B rating by itself is decent I suppose. But look carefully. This is a follow-up inspection. The previous rating was 44 – U! What happened? I have no clue. Forsyth County doesn’t give me the chance to download the original inspection report, much less see the reasoning behind it. I’m willing to bet that this follow-up inspection was conducted just a few days after the first inspection. That 44 rating was on their wall for a very short period of time.
BB’s concerns me in some respects. I know at one point last year they sported a C rating in the 70′s. Again, I don’t know the reasoning why as those reports are no longer online. But it is cases like this that I’d like to chronicle as a food blogger. Here is a restaurant that has had more than one below average health inspection.
I believe the intent of the inspection process is to be transparent. The reports are posted in conspicuous places in the restaurants. They are posted online… sort of. But to be truly valuable, county health departments should provide historical reports online. Those reports should be searchable on name, location, date and score.
In an ideal world, I would publish a periodic list of restaurants with lower scores. I would provide links to pertinent inspection reports and let my readers make their own judgments. I would not go into the how or why or inject my opinion. Let the facts speak for themselves. Unfortunately those facts are not readily available to the public. Your favorite restaurant might have a systemic food safety problem that is hiding behind a stellar follow-up report and a lousy county website. Bon appetite!
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