We’ve attracted attention from the St. Pete fish wrapper, particularly its food critic, Laura Reiley, who posted this at her blog today in response to a smartass jab from us yesterday (read down in the comments section, until you come to the one from that Dave H jerk). At the risk of inflaming our disagreement with people who buy ink by the barrel, we’ve responded at her blog. Now we’ll respond at our own.
First, it’s really not about you, Laura. Well, ok, it is but not the way you seem to think where you say at the top “At question: Is it my job to evaluate the sanitation of a restaurant?”
We never suggested that you evaluate restaurant sanitation. We’re suggesting that you pay attention to people who are paid by the state to evaluate restaurant sanitation and report their findings where relevant to one of your own restaurant reviews.
Laura, in case you missed it, recently had kind things to say about several local eateries, which have been fined by the state for health and safety violations since 2005. That isn’t a big deal in it’s own right but a couple of these places were fined fairly large amounts within the last six months and one of them was actually ordered to temporarily close, until violations were corrected. That is kind of a big deal, at least in our book.
We don’t know about y’all but we aren’t plannng on taking the family out to eat at that place any time soon, no matter what Laura says about it. For all we know it’s a great restaurant that just had a bad moment on the most perfectly awful day. We don’t care. We aren’t going.
Maybe it’s just us but we think not. We actually think a lot of people would like to know that a place Laura describes in positive prose was described in much less positve prose by inspectors with a view of the kitchen, and a horrific one at that, if their report is to be believed.
At question, Laura, is whether you should pay attention to all this inspection data and include the most relevant stuff in your reviews. Beyond that, ma’m, how about just routinely reminding people that they can easily find this information on their own at Fined Dining and the state’s search tool before they decide where to spend their dining-out dollar?
Let’s keep in mind that just last August Florida was ranked first in the nation for cases of food-borne illness based on 2005 data compiled from the Centers for Disease Control. More recently, Bill Veach, director of Florida’s Division of Hotels and Restaurants, told a local TV reporter that his agency is understaffed. Combine these two elements and you’ve got ingredients for an issue that might just interest the food critic for one of the state’s largest newspapers.
Or not. Laura, in her blog post, seems to suggest that restaurant inspections aren’t all that reliable because they’re really just random snapshots by inspectors who can be a little arbitrary at times. That and, of course, food poisoining is bound to happen, if you go out to eat often enough. The good news, though, is that it probably won’t kill you.
Thank you, Mrs. Upton Sinclair. We’ll keep that in mind.
But we really don’t know what to make of Laura’s remark about how she might have to go out with state inspectors for a few days in order to evaluate their job performances. Seriously? Gawd, we hope not. Instead, Laura, why not hang back in the office and concentrate on your own?