Articles

How safe is that restaurant?
New system spells it out

By Elizabeth Lee
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jan. 27, 2006

Knowing how clean a restaurant is will soon be as easy as reading your ABC's — and U's.

Customers won't even have to walk inside a restaurant to know how it scored. New state rules require posting the grades on drive-through windows and front doors, with a few exceptions.

The changes are part of an overhaul of Georgia's 10-year-old food service code that will take effect later this year. Many of the changes are intended to reduce the risk of foodborne illness, from requiring restaurants to have someone certified in food safety on staff, to barring buffet servers from pouring a half-empty canister of broccoli salad into one fresh from the kitchen.

The letter grade system should give a more accurate picture of a restaurant's operations, said Mike Mullet, a spokesman for the Georgia Division of Public Health.

"We know when a restaurant is above par or below par, but the scoring system we had didn't really reflect what the inspector saw in the restaurant," said Vernon Goins, a spokesman for the Gwinnett County Health Department. "Now ... it will be immediately clear to anyone who's checking out a restaurant if they want to eat there or not, based on the grade they got. This is getting Georgia in line with the rest of the country."

The state's current system allows restaurants with one critical violation — such as holding foods at an improper temperature, which could cause foodborne illness — to earn a score in the 90s. The new grading system awards an "A" only if none of those categories is violated.

The grading rules are tougher in other ways, too. Restaurants that fail in at least three critical categories must display a red "U" on their doors and can only raise their grade to a "C" on initial re-inspection. They'll have to keep the yellow "C" on their door for 60 days, until the next routine inspection.

"The health department will be taken more seriously by the restaurants with this approach," said Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety in Griffin.

Along with the stick, there's a carrot. Top-scoring restaurants that score three "A's" in a row don't have to be inspected as often; just once or twice a year rather than two or three times. Restaurants that earn "B's" or "U's," on the other hand, will get at least one extra inspection.

The changes, in the works for more than a year, were made with input from the restaurant industry. They are based on the federal Food and Drug Administration's 2001 and 2005 Model Food Code.
The current rules are based on the FDA's 1993 code.

"Our take is that all of them are reasonable and doable," said Ron Wolf, executive director of the Georgia Restaurant Association, a trade group with 2,000 restaurant members. "Some of the [changes] have been norms in our industry for some time. They're simply spelling them out in the code."

Some restaurant owners applaud the emphasis on food safety but question how the rules will be enforced. Under the current system, that varies by inspector, said Chris Sedgwick, owner of Sedgwick Restaurant Group, which operates Van Gogh's, Pure Taqueria and Aspen's Seafood and Steaks on the Northside.

"I don't mind being held to a high standard, but I want to make sure it's consistently applied to everybody," Sedgwick said.

Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. More information: www.ajc.com.

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