423 inspections, no names: what the state actually found in our kitchens this summer

Four hundred twenty-three times between July 1 and Sept. 4, somebody from the state walked into a kitchen in this county with a thermometer and a clipboard and started opening things.

That is the number in the file. Not a sample, not an estimate. Four hundred twenty-three inspections, at 327 licensed locations, across a summer.

I want to tell you what is in that file, and I want to be honest about what it is not. It is not a review. Nobody at the Tattler ate anything to produce this column. I did not walk into a single one of these rooms. I downloaded a spreadsheet from the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, pulled the rows the state codes to our county, and counted. That is the whole method, and you can download the same file.

I am also not going to print anybody’s name. Not one. There are 315 businesses in that file and I am not building a wall of shame out of a regulatory document, partly because it would be lazy and mostly because of what the numbers turn out to say.

The shape of it

Three hundred forty-seven of the 423 were routine inspections. The rest were complaint visits and licensing visits.

One thing to hold onto before you read the table: the state files a return visit under the same routine code as the original. So 347 counts visits, not restaurants, and the call-back lines below are the state going back to check its own work.

Here is how those 347 came out.

Forty percent came out clean enough that the inspector did not plan to come back early. The state’s own words for that outcome: “Sanitary and safety conditions did not warrant a follow-up visit to ensure correction.”

The other sixty percent is where people usually stop reading carefully, so let us go slowly.

Three tiers, and only one of them is scary

The state sorts what it writes up into three buckets, and they are not equivalent. Its definitions, quoted:

High priority items “could contribute directly to a foodborne illness or injury.” That is the one that matters. Look at what the state files under it and you can see why: receiving and holding cold foods cold, holding hot foods hot, cooling, reheating, separating raw animal foods from everything else, bare hand contact. It is mostly temperature and mostly cross-contamination.

Intermediate items are those “which, if not addressed, could lead to risk factors that contribute to foodborne illness or injury.” One step back from harm.

Basic items are “those which are considered best practices to implement.”

Across all 347 routine inspections, the state wrote up 1,747 items: 485 high priority, 357 intermediate, 905 basic. The single largest category, by a lot, is the one the state itself describes as best practice.

The median routine inspection turned up four items total. The worst one turned up 22.

And 139 of the 347, two in five, recorded zero high-priority items. Not zero findings. Zero of the kind that can make you sick.

The part I did not expect

Seven licenses in this county drew the most serious thing on the menu this summer: a recommendation for an emergency order, which is the mechanism behind what you would call a temporary closure. Six of those came out of a routine inspection, which is why the table above says six. The seventh came off a complaint visit in July.

All seven are recorded as back in compliance.

One cleared the same day. Five cleared the next day. The slowest took two, and that one shows up in the file seven separate times across four days in August, which is what a state inspector standing in your doorway over and over looks like when it is rendered as spreadsheet rows.

Countywide, there were 100 call-back visits in the window. Seventy-nine came back Complied.

That is the number I would want a stranger to know about the restaurants here. Not the 69 administrative complaints. The follow-through.

What I am not saying

An inspection is a snapshot of one morning. A place with fourteen findings in July is not necessarily worse than a place with two, because the two might mean a slow inspector or a quiet Tuesday, and every cook reading this already knows that.

None of it tells you whether the food is good. The state does not taste anything. A kitchen can post a spotless record and still send out a sandwich that tastes like an apology.

And nearly all of this lands on people making a wage that does not remotely track what we charge tourists for a plate. The line cook did not choose the walk-in.

So: no names, no scores, no rankings. If you want to look up a specific place, the state lets you, free, and it will show you the inspector’s actual write-up instead of my summary of it. Start at the DBPR inspection records page and search the name.

Bring the same skepticism you would bring to a five-star review. It is one morning, written down by one person, and then somebody went back to check.