The Health Department has been giving restaurants letter grades for nine months now—so how're our eateries doing? A-OK, actually. Health Commissioner Thomas Farley showed up at City Council yesterday to tout the good news that more than half of the 15,000 restaurants the department has inspected since the new system was put in place are now sporting blue A's in their windows.
Even better, only about 11 percent of the restaurants—or roughly 1,600—have C's up in their windows. Something which Farley thinks is proof that "the system is motivating restaurants to improve their safety practices."
Sadly the DoH didn't release a system-wide report like they did at the grading program's six-month anniversary but if the stats Farley quoted are true then the new system is clearly doing something. When you look at the inspection results for the year between March 1, 2010 through February 28, 2011 [PDF] the numbers are less rosy. When you look at those annual numbers only, 37 percent of restaurants would have earned an A, 41 percent would have gotten a B and 17 percent would have gotten a C (with the remaining five percent being closed). That the percentage of A's could jump from 41 percent to over 50 percent when you change the sample from twelve months to nine months certainly says something. We'll give the benefit of the doubt that it isn't saying the inspectors are going easy on the job.
