Do You Smell a Rat?

Restaurant closures have more than tripled in the weeks after local news showed rats running wild inside a KFC/Taco Bell. According to figures in various news reports at least 250-300 restaurants have been shuttered in the two months following the rat report. Want to guess who’s ultimately picking up the tab for those closures?

“It easily has cost restaurants several million dollars,” Chuck Hunt of the New York Restaurant Association, told reporters. You can add to that lost wages for hourly workers, food spoilage and lost tax revenues for the city. The Department of Health issued a report last month on the KFC/Taco Bell incident, but its recommendations only heightened my suspicion that the agency, like most political animals, has no real agenda other than to shield itself from criticism.

In practice, the city's health inspectors have obviously been given a directive, either implicitly or explicitly, to send a message by closing more restaurants. That message seems to be: you make us look bad, watch out. But ultimately it makes no sense to respond to a problem that was admittedly enabled by bureaucratic incompetence with an even greater display of bureaucratic incompetence. Look at this way: the public witnessed a restaurant it knew to be filthy stay open until it was literally overrun with rats. That screamed incompetence. Now, we're watching our favorite restaurants, which we believe to be clean, aggressively being closed. Does that not also scream incompetence, if not something more nefarious?

The end result of this food cop reign of terror is nothing more than an unfair "tax" on kitchen laborers, less money in the city’s coffers, hits to their reputations that many restaurants may not recover from--and less confidence among citizens that the Health Department knows what it is doing. The real issue here is not dirty kitchens but dirty government. The proper response from the Health Department to the KFC/Taco Bell incident would have been to concentrate on cleaning up its own filthy house and restoring public confidence. Instead, they're feeding us shit.--F

One Croque Monsieur, Hold the Vermin!

A new day has dawned for New York diners, and you can thank the rats. After a pack of the little buggers made national news by commandeering a KFC/Taco Bell in the west village and mugging for the cameras, the board of health realized it might just have to go to work. The result is a food-cop reign of terror that saw our beloved neighborhood bistro, L'Express, become one of 83 restaurants closed by the health department in the days after the embarrassing rat episode.

Also closed was the popular Union Square eatery, the Coffee Shop. And the owner is pissed. Co-owner Charles Milite told the New York Post that a city inspector scoured the place for 3 1/2 hours instead of his usual 60 to 90 minutes. "After 17 years of business and a clean bill of health, they have decided we cannot store a sealed jar of olives on the floor, we need rubber gloves in our resuscitation kit, and we must place end cups on fluorescent lights in our dish area and prep kitchen," they wrote in a notice posted on the restaurant's entrance.

If you know the Coffee Shop, it is a popular place right on Union Square that serves homey, if pretty average food. It's known mostly as a hangout for models and aspiring actors, so if someone is throwing up after eating at the Coffee Shop it is probably because they're purging, not food poisoned. I'm sure most diners are more concerned about catching an STD there than food poisoning. I don't even want to think about where the rubber gloves from their rescusitation kit ended up. Nevertheless, Milite's right when he says he smells a backlash simmering at the Department of Health.

What does closing down all these restaurants really accomplish? The real, practical effect is that each restaurant's hardworking staff are needlessly losing their pay.

L'Express is a fine esablishment. Spoon and I often go there for their authentic bistro fare: they serve an excellent warm goat cheese salad, a killer croque monsieur, and they make their own delicious lyonnaise sausages, pate and duck liver mousse. Sometimes, I find myself craving escargot. It's also a great place to kick back with a fat cafe au lait, or a glass of wine or a beer.

I'll admit, my second thought after hearing they'd been closed for 24 hours, after "what a shame," was "what better time to dine there than the day after coming back from a department of health closure?" So, Spoon and I had a lovely, ultra-sanitary meal there upon their reopening, which we finished with a creme brulee. Just our way of letting our friends at L'Express know we never doubted them. --F