Learning the Alphabet : Health Grades Make New NYC Restaurants Suffer

New restaurants in town may be losing out on potential customers due to little awareness among restaurant goers about the health grades awarded by the City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

“If I go to a restaurant that I don’t know with a friend and its got a low rating, we’d probably says ooh it has a B rating, do we want to go there? And more often, we will go elsewhere,” said Beth Foreman, Upper East Side resident and, a paralegal, and hiring manager at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, who eats out at least once a week.

But does this discrimination apply only to new restaurants? One wonders how people would react if their favorite joint got knocked down a notch on the health grade. It seems, they couldn’t care less.

“If I’d already been there a lot, probably not. Once you’re established it’s fine, but it’s kind of a barrier to entry. I’m not going to go there if it’s already got a bad grade, but if I’ve been there and I know what I’m getting and what I’m in for, then it’s okay,” said John McAllister, a civil engineer at Apex Companies.

On its website the DOHMH acknowledges, “In the first year or so of grading, we expect that most restaurants will earn a B grade. Restaurants with B or C grades should improve their overall food safety practices, but the Health Department immediately closes restaurants with conditions that may be hazardous to public health.”

Most people who want to eat out, take the grade on its face value and not for what it actually means.

“I’m vaguely familiar with the grading system. A has no violations. B could mean minor violations, doesn’t mean its dirty,” said Foreman.

The DOHMH has laid out a number of violations, and health inspectors assign points to the restaurants for the nature and the severity of such violations. A restaurant that earns 0–13 points gets an A grade, while points in the range of 14–27 get a B. Anything higher gets a C grade.

These grades are reviewed after a year for those restaurants that score an A, five to seven months for those with a B, and every three to five months for those with a C grade, till the score comes to under 28 points.

But does an A grade mean all is well with the eatery? Not necessarily. According to data on the NYC Open Data website, over 20,000 restaurants with a health grade of ‘A’ flagged ‘critical violations’ in inspections conducted since the beginning of 2015.