By Steve Cuozzo
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Chef Thomas Keller inside the Per Se kitchen the Health Department criticizedPhoto: AP Photo/Richard Drew
The Department of Health’s intrepid crusaders, who for a second time stripped the great, 3-Michelin-star restaurant Per Se of its “A” rating this week, won’t likely peel away a single customer.
Devotees of chef Thomas Keller’s cuisine from Hong Kong, Paris and Abu Dhabi who booked months in advance wouldn’t care if city inspectors claimed to find live tarantulas swarming over tables.
Nor should they. Neither should New Yorkers who know anything about the Ministry of Mouse-Dropping Enforcement’s rotten inspection system — a long-running joke that was inflated to Public Nuisance No. 1 by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and showing no signs of being rationalized by Mayor de Blasio.
By my calculations, the Health Department deploys 19 times more inspectors proportionately for restaurants than the Department of Buildings does for buildings — one for every 160 eateries compared with one for every 3,075 structures.
While we read about fatal wall collapses, construction accidents and elevator mishaps, the last time I checked, no one has yet been killed by defective meat loaf.
The idea that “no handwashing facility in the food prep area,” one of Per Se’s sins, imperils the dining millions is far-fetched anywhere: most restaurant kitchens are so small that the “food prep area” might be all of six feet from the bathroom sink.
It’s criminally ludicrous at Per Se, which is immaculately clean by any English-language definition.
“You could probably eat off Per Se’s floor,” observed celebrated Regency Bar & Grill chef Dan Silverman, a view widely shared by restaurant professionals flabbergasted by the situation.
Per Se was also penalized for “hot food held below 140 degrees” and “cold food held over 41 degrees.”
The temperature rules are inimical to first-class cuisine and ignorant of modern cooking techniques.
Even if they weren’t, how could you trust clueless agents to interpret this “critical” infraction, one of a zillion “Inspection Scoring Parameters” helpfully posted on the DOH website: “Reduced Oxygen Packaged Food not cooled by an approved method whereby the internal product temperature is reduced to 38 degrees within two hours of cooking and if necessary further cooled to a temperature of 34 degrees within six hours of reaching 38 degrees.”
Once a mere bureaucratic apparatus to alert customers to “evidence of flies,” the inspection fraud mushroomed under Bloomberg into a municipal ATM, reeling in $45 million in fines in a single year.
That it occasionally harpoons a marquee name like Per Se fosters the myth of a democratic, level-playing-field methodology which spares not even the most renowned restaurant.You’re safe eating out, folks! Your health Nazis are on the case!
Per Se plans to appeal to a Health Department tribunal, no doubt with the help of “sanitation consultants” which well-heeled owners employ to fight inappropriate fines.
I hope they prevail, even though I have no great affection for a place which raised its minimum nine-course meal price from $150 in 2004 to $295 two years ago.
I stand as one against the Health Department even with Joanne, the Upper West Side trattoria owned by Lady Gaga’s father Joe Germanotta, where I’m literally banned over a harsh review.
Germanotta fumed on Twitter that he was downgraded from an “A” to a “B” rating “because we had a bad potato in a bin with 40 good potatoes.”
The offending spud, moreover, “wasn’t being served to a customer, it was raw, and when the inspector pointed it out we threw it away. How many bad veggies do you toss?”
I take him at his word.
My friends in the business have suffered inspectors who barged in at peak hours, commandeered precious dining room tables for paperwork — and capriciously interpreted, or misunderstood entirely, the DOH rules they’re supposed to enforce.
Among other inanities, they forbid chefs from touching food with bare hands.
Rigorously obeyed, it would put every decent Japanese restaurant out of business.
Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack creator Danny Meyer famously tweeted once, “3d consecutive exceptional omikase experience @ Ushwakamaru [a place on West Houston Street]. Ignore ‘B’ letter grade.
Just means sushi chefs refuse 2 wear rubber gloves.” Gloves ruin the delicate flavor of raw fish. They also undermine the chef’s craft: sushi preparation is all about working with bare hands.
Yet, although hundreds of Japanese joints ignore the rule, victims of contaminated sushi have yet to flood emergency rooms.
A prominent Manhattan chef/owner with no axe to grind, having never been stigmatized by DOH, states: “The inspectors, uneducated, follow the [department’s] book in black-and-white terms without common sense. In that book, cold food is ice cold, hot means very hot. There’s not a restaurant worth its soul that could pass that test.”
Inspectors neither know nor care about “resting” times, when food is tempered after stint in the oven or grill and when there’s every reason for it not to be “held” at 140 degrees.
“At the letter of the law, it’s illegal to serve a rare hamburger, because the center of the hamburger will never be 140 degrees,” the chef said.
“The same thing goes for chicken. The Health Department’s minimum cooking temperatures for certain things are antiquated.”
Similarly, this chef says, inspectors want cold food to be served right out of the refrigerator, “but you can’t serve salad or cheese ice cold. ”
Meanwhile, with rare exceptions like this week’s warning about bacteria-infected fish in the city’s Chinatowns, the DOH winks at Canal Street purveyors selling live turtles and crabs on sidewalks.
Eat them, inspectors
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Having eaten at The French Laundry in Yountville as well as his other restaurants in the area I must conclude with the author that this is simply a money grab. His places are super clean and the staff is extraordinarily knowledgeable and staffed with people who are passionate about food. Because Keller is so well respected he gets to choose staff. To work for Keller is a serious resume enhancer. He is extraordinary creative and dedicated to fresh and locally grown ingredients, some of which come from The French Laundry's own gardens. Look at the photo of his kitchen. Does that look like a greasy spoon place?
To conclude people who mock the price of a meal at Per Se or The French Laundry have a mindset that cannot conceive of the amount of work it takes to create one of his meals...as it has been said they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
If you want to sample some of his simpler meals at a very reasonable price then try his restaurant "Ad Hoc" in Yountville. For around $50 per person you get a three course meal. The menu is fixed and changes daily.
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