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Hi everyone! It's Josh here and for this week's select, I've chosen our episode on restaurant
inspections.
It may just put you off eating at restaurants ever again.
I know it did for me.
I have an in-in restaurant since we released this episode and that was back in 2017.
Hold on, hold on everyone, I'm sorry.
Okay.
Everyone apparently that is not true.
I do still eat at restaurants.
Who knew?
But at any rate, I hope you enjoy the stomach-churning select.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles, W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry Roland.
You put the three of us in the room together with some raw chicken and some old mop water.
You got yourself Stuff You Should Know.
So gross.
So Chuck.
Have you ever like been to a restaurant and seen something that you weren't supposed
to see and been like, oh, I just ate here?
I used to work at restaurants as you know and you know, some are more pretty gross.
I worked at a couple of myself and I never saw anything that was like, this is wrong.
But I've realized over the years that I'm in the minority in that sense.
Dude, my first job as a bus boy, that was one of, I saw some of the most horrific
things in my life, mainly because they had, oh, man.
It was the people that worked there.
They were dirty folks.
They were dirty folks and they were just, they were people that didn't care about their
own personal health and hygiene in any way.
It was all gross, gross, gross.
I saw a guy one time.
Should I even say this?
Yes, please, dish.
When you're talking about kids working in the kitchen that are gross, like drop, high
school dropouts, and hey, I'm not knocking you if you dropped out of high school.
Go get that GED and keep at it.
But these were not those people.
They couldn't, they couldn't even spell GED.
Right.
They're like, I didn't get my gid.
Yeah.
So these people, they were gross people and I was 13 and I couldn't speak up.
I didn't know like, I'm not going to go to the owner of the restaurant at 13 because
he didn't care.
But I saw one of these dishwashers go into a walk-in cooler and he was so mad about the
schedule that they put him on.
He took the lid off of a big, you know, 15 gallon pot of Brunswick stew and he put his
shoot foot and leg into it all the way to the bottom and then took it back out.
And let me tell you, man, those shoes, I've never had more disgusting clothing in my life
than the clothes that I worked in at a barbecue restaurant.
I know, they're like the whole reason Crocs are in businesses because it's the only
thing that won't slide across the greasy dirt and floor of every single restaurant in
every single city in the entire world.
Everything about that job was disgusting.
They would drop meat on the ground and say good catch and laugh and then pick it up
off the floor.
It was like, it was like Upton St. Clairs, the jungle, the jungle, like right before my
little 13-year-old eyes, I'd grew up on that job in many, many ways.
The only way that it could have been more like the jungle is if somebody actually died in
the Brunswick stew and they just kept him in there, it was so foul, dude.
That's grody, man.
I didn't even know what our restaurant inspection score was.
I didn't even, I saw nothing like that at the restaurants I worked at.
I worked at a handful of them, nothing like that.
Yeah, I worked at a bunch more and it was nothing like that.
This was the worst of the worst.
Oh my God.
They're all burning in hell now.
That's so gross.
I drove by that place the other day on the way to Emily's parents.
I went a different route and now it's like a cheat sheet, a title max.
Yeah, okay.
Which I don't even know what that is.
You can pawn your car title there for extremely exorbitant interest rates.
Got you.
Well, the ghosts of Rednecks Pass dwell within those floors.
Wow, man.
Barbecue any good?
I guess that's a moot point, right?
I still ate there.
Oh, dude, after the shoe thing.
Yeah, man, I was a kid.
I didn't know.
I mean, I didn't have Brunswick's due that day.
Okay, good.
Or ever again.
I don't know.
I just, I didn't know any better.
I was dumb.
You ate the Brunswick's due chucked in.
I got a lot smarter after that.
Well, I, again, I've never seen anything in person, but I have, I've been on the internet
and seen things like that guy who peed in the coffee apparently every day.
But I think that was at an office, not a restaurant.
There's like this laundry list of fingers being found in food.
I saw an article I think on like MPR or something.
And it was like just basically the top five times fingers were found in food at restaurants
and it happens a lot.
Yeah, just quickly, I should say that there, I feel bad for restaurant owners sometimes,
especially places like that that it's not like some nice kind of place in town.
You can do all you can do, but you still can't account for some little jerk employee that's
mad about something that wants to spit in someone's food on camera.
Yeah.
You know, you can't just, you can't watch everyone 100% of the time.
And that's usually what is a case like that, like this dumb dishwasher kid.
He just goes into walk-ins and watch this.
Right.
And there's, I saw, like there's a case to be made then for not hiring young people.
You hire people who have like built a background for themselves, like a career for themselves.
All right.
Those are called good restaurants.
Right.
That's the difference.
Yeah, I guess that is the difference.
So in a sense, it's very much the owner's fault for being a cheap bastard and hiring
people who put their shoot foot in the Brunswick stew.
Okay.
So my point is this chuck that the shoot foot fingers in the and in Arby's like all these
little things that that are just horrible and horrific and disgusting would be vastly
worse and vastly more frequent where it's not for a lone group of people.
The thin blue line between us and utter chaos when it comes to restaurants, the health
inspector.
Yeah.
This was, I'm so excited about this episode.
Yeah.
It's going to be a good one, man.
Like, I don't know.
When you sent it over, it was like, all right.
But then I started reading and it was interesting and awesome and there's history to it.
Yeah.
And one of these consumer advocacy shows that we love to do.
We're doing our little rough, nature impression.
Man, I love that guy.
Great American.
So, restaurants, health inspectors are something of a new-ish invention.
They're certainly not really old because at least in the United States, it wasn't until
that book you mentioned, the jungle, was published in 1905 that people like really sat up
and took notice and Congress acted almost immediately.
Just the pure food and drug act the next year.
That's the impact that Ups and Sinclair's the jungle had.
Yeah.
Rightfully so.
And in the book, I mean, he went undercover.
He was a muck-raking journalist.
God bless him.
And he went undercover to basically just take notes on all the horrible things he saw
in the meat-packing industry in slaughterhouses.
And he chronicled all the inhumane things that he saw in the way the animals were treated.
But he also saw the inhumane ways the workers were treated.
And his book had this impact and Congress actually acted.
They created the pure food and drug act.
And one of the things that came out of that was what came to be known as the food code.
And the food code is basically like, here are the things that you should be doing in your
restaurant to prevent from running a foul of the law or creating food-borne illnesses.
Yeah.
And the previous to this, states were kind of taking care of their own health issues as
best they could on their own.
But then when that book came out, people were like, wait a minute, they're shipping meat
across state lines.
So the states aren't taking care of it themselves.
This meat's going out everywhere.
So it became a federal thing to be regulated.
They made a federal case out of what they did.
And along with the pure food and drug act, very importantly, the Federal Meat Inspection Act
was passed in that same year.
Because I think everyone, even back then, I kept your grossed out in 1906, then they weren't
as sensitive as we are today.
So there was some gnarly stuff going on, dude.
A guy falling into like a hot dog grinder?
Come on.
So the food code, the early food code that is was sort of the same stuff that we see today
generally, we have refined everything over the years with science as to what's truly
dangerous and not and how it gets dangerous.
But even back then, they were concerned about like proper meat storage and food storage
and temperatures of things and the hygiene of employees and the premises themselves.
Yeah, because basically what constitutes good practices hasn't changed all that much.
But to respond to changes that do come about, that do change best practices or our understanding
of the science of like foodborne illnesses, the food code was republished every year,
starting in 1993.
Every two years, they updated it and republished it.
And then in 2001, they moved it to four years.
But that to me is like that, friends, is the reason we pay taxes.
So that there are people who are going around finding out the most cutting edge understanding
of how we get sick from foods at restaurants.
Then also finding out the exact ways to prevent this from happening, publishing it into a book
and distributing it to the states who then put it into practice.
It takes money to do this kind of thing, but that's why we pay taxes.
The next time somebody tells you that they don't care about government regulations and that
we live in a nanny state, you remind them of what it would be like if they ate out of
a restaurant without this kind of stuff.
Yeah, those people.
We don't need government regulating stuff.
All right, sir, then you will be eating eyeball.
Right.
You'll be eating human eyeball in your next Frank Verder.
I will feed it to you myself.
So the food code today, just like that very first one back in 1934, is voluntary.
It is not federal law.
It is still up to those states to go out and write their own rules.
It aligns generally with the federal regulations and what the FDA recommends.
And then it gets a little more confusing because when it comes down to actual restaurant
inspections, there is no federal or state inspector that comes in there.
This is the city or the county who is going to be carrying this out.
And they work with the state and then intern the federal government to kind of all be on
the same page.
Right.
Yeah, I think it's almost kind of like the government's the one who has the funding
to go actually look around and survey and find the science and put these best practices
out.
But it's the county or the city where the rubber meets the road.
The shoe meets the pavement more like where the shoe meets the Brunswick's do.
That's so right.
And not the Brunswick's do.
That's like one of the best things out at Barbecue.
Let's take a break, shall we?
Yeah.
And I'm going to go brush my tongue with the toothbrush.
Okay.
And I'll be right back.
All right.
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Okay, and we're back in Chuck.
Let me smell your breath.
How's that?
Man, that is nice.
The Listerine.
Yeah.
If I do detect us that Tom's toothpaste, you used.
No.
Okay.
What toothpaste do you use?
I use, I'm using Crest right now.
Which one?
The orange one?
No.
That's my favorite.
Yeah.
So the color of the packaging is orange, but the type of mint.
It's like called citrus mint, but you would never, if you didn't see that, you wouldn't
be like, oh, this is citrus mint.
It's just its own type of very pleasant mint flavor sensation.
Yeah, I just use the regular, not the white, but I think it's like the blue Crest right
now.
Pro health, I think?
Yeah, yeah, pro health.
And then a dude used the Listerine now.
I've been on that for a solid couple of years.
Yeah.
Because it's six and one.
Six benefits and one.
Why are we talking about this?
I don't know.
Man, we're not even getting paid for that.
Maybe mine is, maybe mine is aquafresh.
It's either aquafresh or Crest, whichever one makes citrus mint, that's what I used.
But do you remember aim?
Oh, yeah.
What was that?
So that stuff, I think it's still around.
It actually doesn't do anything as far as brushing your teeth goes, as far as toothpaste
goes, but remember, it came out in three different colors like green, red and white, and it was
just pretty, but it's bad toothpaste.
I don't, I'm not a big fan of it, but I love looking at it.
How about that?
I remember that.
All right, so back to food inspection.
Now that our mouths are clean, there are usually three kinds of food safety inspections.
You got your reg, the one that's done on the reg.
It's known as a routine inspection, and that's the one where they come in.
It might be every six months, might be every year and a half or so, depending on some
stuff we'll get to here in a bit.
That's the one where you go in and you see the thing on the wall that gives it the score.
That's the one where you're working in the restaurant and the owner and the manager freak
out.
They're like, oh God, no, no.
They do.
The second they walk through the door, although I will say in New Jersey where I worked at
the store in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, we were always great.
They took it really seriously.
Every time the inspector came by, they were like, come on in.
That's the way it should be.
It's a big shout out to the store in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
Way to go to the store.
That place was great.
They had a restaurant group and they had like six restaurants and they're all done the
right way.
I don't think you could really have a restaurant group without approaching food inspection
and health standards in that way, too.
Yeah, I mean, this is dumb not to.
From what I saw too, we also kind of, did you read that mental philosophy, are you going
to lie, son?
Yeah.
One of the things, it's called 12 Secrets of Restaurant Health Inspectors.
One of the things they point out is that usually the bigger the chain, so whether it's a restaurant
group on up to a global chain, like, you know, like, one of those guys.
Sure.
Oh, wow.
Cheeks, buddy.
You're probably going to see something close to 100 every time.
And the reason why is because they have a lot of skin in the game.
They have a lot to lose, right?
If, like, they pointed out with Chipotle.
Like, there were one or two locations of Chipotle's where some bad cilantro got some people
sick with E. coli.
And all Chipotle suffered as a result.
People just stopped going.
They lost hundreds of millions of dollars and came probably pretty close to going under
there for a little while.
And I think they're still definitely clawing their way out from under it.
So they don't just rely on state, county, or city health inspectors.
They do their own.
They hire their own third parties to come in and carry out health inspections much more
frequently than the government's doing.
Just to make sure that they're up to standards.
Yeah.
So your local fast food chain is more likely to be super clean than the mom and pop in
theory.
But in my opinion, you're also more likely going to find the kid in the kitchen that
goes, hey, watch this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's definitely trade off.
Yeah.
Because it's definitely not to say that, you know, mom and pop places are inherently unsafe.
If it's a family business, you have just as much skin in the game as a global restaurant
chain because this is your family's livelihood.
So yeah, you're going to take it seriously.
So getting back the other two types of inspections real quick besides the routine are the follow-up
investigation where they do say, all right, you need to fix these things.
I'll be back next Thursday or I'll be back tomorrow, depending on what's going on.
Right.
Or I'll shut down your restaurant while you fix this stuff.
It's so bad.
And then there are inspections that are triggered by consumer complaints.
Yes, that's the one where they like use the bat signal.
But instead of a bat, it's like a fork in the sky.
And then the restaurant inspector swoops in is like, I'm here.
I'm here.
Everybody calm down.
Yeah.
So I mentioned that people restaurants will be inspected maybe every six months, maybe every
year, a year and a half.
They are, it's not really nilly.
They are assessed a risk factor as an establishment by the county or the, you know, whatever local
municipality is carrying this out.
And that has to do with a bunch of things.
Sometimes it's the kind of food.
Like if you're serving sushi, you might get inspected a little more.
Shushi.
Shushi, because you're serving raw fish.
Yeah.
That doesn't say sushi that don't.
Shushi that don't, did I?
No, no, no.
Oh, no, that's Steve Bruehl.
Steve Bruehl.
Shushi Shamish.
I thought it was my missing tooth.
No.
Or if you're cooking meat or whatever raw meat, you might get inspected a little more than
a deli that just has, you know, pre-prepared meats and foods.
Yeah.
Those cold cuts are already cooked.
They're serving you raw turkey slices.
Like it's already cooked.
They're just putting it together under a sandwich.
Yeah.
That's a low-risk restaurant, comparatively speaking.
Yeah.
You know how it gets to me, even though I love a euro, is when I see the thing on the
spit next to the heat lamp rotating around.
Right.
I always just think, how safe is that?
I would guess if it's operating in the United States safe enough.
Okay.
That's the whole point of restaurant inspectors so that you don't have to ask that question.
Now, you can look at that and say, somebody who knows what they're doing has inspected
that and determined that is not a threat to my health.
Maybe it just creeps me out to look at it.
No, I'm with you.
I understand.
I also want to say there are some places where you go in and you're like, this is clearly
in violation of some health codes, I have no idea how this place is allowed to stay like
this, but it's still worth it.
And I would direct you to Anne's ghetto burger.
Oh, yeah.
Right by your house.
Yeah, that's just on the street.
Yes.
Have you had one?
I've never had an Anne's because I thought that she'd left and it closed, but it's still
going.
Is she still running it, you know?
I don't know.
She had been threatening to retire for 20 years or something.
But I knew she wanted to get bought out and didn't want to just close it down.
So hopefully she was able to retire.
That's my hope.
All I know is the Wall Street Journal said it was, I think, maybe the best hamburger in
the United States.
The Wall Street Journal ain't lying.
You know?
Yes.
But if you go there, it's like decades worth of grease just on the vent around the back
splash, like the stainless steel back splash or whatever, splatter guard behind the griddle.
And you're like, how does she get away with that?
And then you take a bite of it and you're like, oh, because it matters not at all compared
to this burger.
Well maybe she is compliant because that is the second risk factor involved with how often
you're going to get inspected, which is if do you have a list of complaints or a record
of violations on your record, then you're going to be on their frequent visitor list.
Right.
You know?
Yeah.
And then, eventually, if you've ever been the source of a foodborne illness, you're on
your high risk automatically.
Yeah, probably permanently.
Yeah, I would think so.
And depending on where you are, you know, like you're going to get lots of visits after
that.
Like that's probably, aside from maybe people getting shot in your restaurant, a foodborne
illness is probably the worst thing that can happen in your restaurant.
Yeah.
I would guess.
And, you know, whether you're, what a new restaurant, well, if you're a new restaurant
in particular, I should say, I think the standard is is that depending on where you fall, as
far as what kind of restaurant you are, whether you're a deli serving cold cuts or a sushi
place serving raw seafood, you're assigned like an initial risk assessment.
And then depending on that risk assessment, if you're a sushi place, say they're going
to come visit every three months for the first year, or if you're a deli, they might come
once every year and a half.
And then depending on how you perform in those inspections, those regular routine inspections
that are basically predetermined by the type of restaurant you are, that schedule can either
diminish or increase.
So let's say that deli is found to be in violation pretty frequently every 18 months.
They're going to start getting inspected every 12 months or every six months, or that sushi
place that's getting inspected every three months or six months.
If it's just painfully obvious that they are top-notch pros who are taking this quite
seriously and never get caught for anything, then that three or six months may end up turning
into a year.
Who knows?
Yeah.
You may have heard reports on the news too that food inspectors have racist policies where
they will go after ethnic restaurants more often.
No, I hadn't heard that.
Is that right?
Yeah, I've seen reports on stuff like that.
Wow.
That they get inspected more frequently if you're having an ethnic restaurant.
That's pretty rotten.
But there is a food safety expert at North Carolina State, named Ben Chapman that says there's
really no data to back that up.
He said, but there could be biases through consumer complaint systems.
Oh, I see.
He said sort of just a snapshot from Yelp reviews, which say what you want about Yelp
reviews.
They're pretty much the worst thing ever.
Right.
But if you look at Yelp reviews, you do a search for food poisoning and close to 70%
of the time, they were ethnic restaurants where people complained about food poisoning.
So I see this food is weird.
It is possible.
I don't recognize it.
And bias comes in through that.
But that makes sense, then, Chuck, like if Yelp is a proxy for the number of times somebody
might call in a complaint, that's one of the ways that a food inspector goes out to
inspect a restaurant is when somebody, the public calls and says something or complains.
So that makes uttering complete sense.
Have you ever called and complained about a restaurant?
Have you ever called the health department?
No.
I never have either.
And they're actually, after researching this article, I was like, I can think of at least
one time when I could have and should have called, just got undercooked chicken.
And you and I both got very sick for like the whole weekend.
And I kept calling this place like, like, what are you guys going to do about this?
You have to do something.
And they just got less and less interested.
More frequently, I call them by the, by like the fourth or fifth time, I was like, we're
still suffering.
And I just wanted to let you know, we're laying around throwing up.
Wow.
And they didn't do anything about it.
There was no, we're sorry.
I think they actually didn't believe me, maybe.
But now that I've read this, I'm like, I totally should have called the health department
on those guys.
What city was this?
It was in Atlanta.
I think I remember that, actually.
We got, so we were sick for an entire weekend.
It's pretty nice place, right?
Yes.
I totally remember this place.
Right across from where we used to work and bucket, actually.
And they could not have cared less.
And that's what ticked me off.
Oh, you were calling the restaurant over.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, I thought you'd call the health inspector over.
No.
But now, I'm like, why wouldn't, why didn't we just call the health inspector?
Not at all.
Now I would call for sure, now that I've done this research, because it's not like, like
what you're doing is helping other people from the, from the same fate before.
Yeah.
You're not being a rat.
Right.
Which is another thing that health inspectors look out for.
All right.
Well, let's talk about that when you, when this is how this goes down.
They're unannounced visits, like I said.
So I've worked it, I've worked it, I don't know, like probably four or five places over
the years.
And two of them were pretty bad.
The aforementioned barbecue place and then where I worked in college.
It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great.
It was a typical like college town, Mexican joint.
But it wasn't like the super professional other restaurants that I've worked at.
But at those first two places, I remember when the restaurant inspector walked through
the door, a panic set in, invariably the one of the, like the GM or whoever the manager
was would immediately confront at a nice, not confront, but greet the person and send,
you know, the understanding was someone go back to the kitchen and tell everyone that the
inspectors here.
And judging from that middle floss article you sent, that's exactly how it works.
And for that reason, the very first thing a good health inspector does is kind of barge
through there and say, I'm going straight to the kitchen right this second.
Right.
Because they know what's going on.
Right.
That's, they have to or else a whole bunch of violations get covered up really quickly.
Very quickly.
And so in that mental floss article, basically they said they needed to do like a, a, a
brisk like run walk through the kitchen as fast as they could.
Isn't that scary?
It is.
But it's also like you, you, you, you, you, scales like what do you do and like just stand
there and freeze.
That's what they should do is be like everybody freeze.
And then like have their finger and, and thumb in the shape of a gun.
Because I don't think they're allowed to actually carry guns.
Well, this one health inspector in the middle floss thing said, we want to see the things
that won't be there in another three to four minutes.
Right.
But that's the thing.
But I mean, it could be anything like this.
There's like, if you are sitting there making food and you have like a cup of Coke, right?
Uh-huh.
You're not supposed to have that there.
Yeah.
And your cell phone in the kitchen.
It's another big one to all bet that is probably the most frequent violation today.
They're covered in poop.
Do you ever see something like, have you ever just stopped and looked at people on the
street like with their phones?
Like they'll just be stopped mid something.
Like they have like a shovel like propped up against their, their shoulder.
Just looking at their phone with their mouth hanging open.
It's like crazy.
We're turning into like a society of zombies, man.
How do you stare at your phone?
I've seen you do that.
You do it in a smarter looking way.
I do the thing where I'm like stroking my chin, thoughtfully.
Right.
Right.
Your mouth is closed.
Exactly.
I'm touched.
All right.
So, uh, the first thing they inspect, obviously the kitchen, the, the manager of the owner,
whoever is there on point is with the inspector the whole time.
Because they're saying like, hey, like little things like that catch a bottle is disgusting.
Like why don't you go ahead and have someone clean that up?
I won't dock you a point.
Right.
But just get it clean.
And the guy wipes it down.
He's like, no, that brand.
It's hot.
I mean, it's a fine thing here.
It's disgusting.
But the first thing they inspect are the dynamic areas, which are the kitchen, food preparation
areas.
Basically, anywhere where there's food actively out is the first place they'll go.
Right.
That's, that's the static area dynamic.
That's the dynamic.
Okay.
And then you start with the hundred points, by the way, I don't know if we mentioned that.
Which I think is kind of optimistic.
It's saying like, I want to believe the best in you.
I'm sure.
So everybody starts with a hundred and then we start deducting from there.
Yeah.
Then it just gets sad.
So, one of the first things they're looking for is employee hygiene.
Because remember what you mentioned, like way back when the food and drug act was created
and the food code was first established, there were a lot of basic tenants that were put
forth back then.
And one of them was the people who cook the food need to be clean as a whistle.
Yep.
And that's one of the big things that the health inspectors looking for.
Are they wearing gloves?
Which by the way is not to say that if an employee is wearing gloves that you're totally
covered, the gloves are supposed to be a fail safe to good hand washing.
So you want them to be washing their hands very frequently and then wearing gloves on top
of that.
But then on top of that, not doing things like, like using their cell phone with the gloves
on.
Because you've just automatically contaminated them and totally defeated the purpose of
using gloves at that point, right?
Yeah.
So there's a lot of hygiene things that are being taken into account.
But how do you tell whether people are washing their hands when you're just walking into
a kitchen?
Of course, they're going to wash their hands in front of you in the way that they're
supposed to be.
But how do you know they're doing it routinely, Chuck?
Well, yeah.
And we should say that there is a way you're supposed to wash the hands.
You don't rinse them off and just dry them with the towel that's sitting by the sink.
Or just below on them.
You rinse?
On the soap, you scrub for 20 seconds and then you dry off with a one-use towel.
And good old, unsustainable, made out of tree paper towel.
Yeah.
Or if you're a really fancy restaurant, you can just have like catch me or towels laying
around, long as you throw them away afterward.
Right.
You have to throw them away.
But your little trick, I know where you're leading, how you can tell is this one very
crafty restaurant inspector in the middle floss article said they go in the first thing
they do.
Because it takes them a couple hours at a, just sort of a normal size restaurant.
For five hours, a big like hotel restaurant.
He said he puts an X on the paper towels.
And if he goes back at the end of his inspection and that X is still on the paper towel, then
he knows hands are not being washed.
Right.
Very sneaking.
For declever.
Yeah.
So I guess we just gave it away though.
So now all the people are going to go check their paper towel rolls.
Oh.
But there are other ways.
Yeah.
That was just a setup to nudge them into the actual way he's telling you like wash your
hands.
Food is another big one too, right?
You want to make sure that the food is being properly stored and properly cooked.
And apparently there is a danger zone between I think like zero and 140 that you want to
hit or that you want to stay outside of.
So basically you want your food, especially like raw meat to be stored at a temperature
frozen, right?
Or else kept at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees Celsius or below for fridges.
And then when you cook it, you have to cook it to at least 160 degrees internal temperature
for beef, pork, all those guys.
And then 145 for fish.
And if a restaurant's not doing that, that's a big, that's a big one as we'll see.
Yeah.
The best way to think about food storage is without getting into the specific temperatures
is if it's supposed to be cold or frozen, it should be cold or frozen.
If it's supposed to be hot, it should be hot.
Is that middle ground is where you're in big trouble.
Exactly.
They talk about lukewarm being the big enemy, right?
That's never good.
lukewarm?
I'm trying to think of a time when lukewarm is preferable with anything.
Yeah.
It just sounds gross.
I like my food really hot, too.
Yeah.
That's the one thing I will send something back is if it was clearly made a little earlier
than the rest of the party at the table.
And it's sort of lukewarm.
I might know, man.
I want steam coming off this thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Throw it in the microwave.
Yeah, they do.
And then they're like, oh, I guess you want a little spit on that, too.
Apparently soup should be, like, the way you reheat things is a big deal because obviously
the brunswick stew, you know, just throw it out every night.
You put it back in the walk-in so some jerk can step in it.
But when you bring soups and broths back to heat, you have to re-boil them entirely from
their refrigerated state.
Which makes sense, but that's never very good for food.
If it's already prepared, once you re-boil it, that's probably you're just going to want
to throw that away then.
Really?
Yeah, man, it toughens everything up where I'll say overcooks it.
It's already been cooked once.
So when you bring it to a boil, you're really cooking it again.
And for food-borne illnesses, that's a good way to treat it, but it doesn't necessarily
make for the most appetizing food.
All right.
I don't know if I grew with that, but that's all right.
That's what I'm going with.
Frozen meat, you don't just say, hey, Jimmy, throw that frozen bird out on the table and
leave it there until this evening.
Right.
You don't just leave food out to thaw.
There are proper ways of thawing and bringing things back to the correct temperature.
Right.
And then so let's say you have a place where you're cutting up that thawed chicken that
was properly thawed.
And then you set the knife down and somebody else picks it up and they start cutting lettuce
with it.
That's cross-contamination.
That is extremely dangerous.
Yeah.
Because as you know, very few people cook their lettuce before they eat it in a salad.
It's raw.
So now it has raw chicken juice on the lettuce that you're eating raw and uncooked and you
can die from that.
So cross-contamination is a big one they look for.
They also, it can be a little more simple, like with something like silverware.
From what I saw, if the silverware is dirty or smudgy, that is a big problem because that
means usually that the whole kitchen is dirty.
There's a lot of, that's like a big red flag that apparently health inspectors will
tell you that if the silverware is dirty, it usually is indicative of just a dirty restaurant
in general.
And I've always heard, I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but you know like
just the plastic soda cups that like a lot of restaurants will have?
Have you ever heard that it's not possible for them to get to the temperature needed to
kill any bacteria on them because they'll melt otherwise?
I have not heard that.
When you drink out of them, they've not really been sanitized from before.
I have not heard that, but as someone who has worked as a dishwasher, you don't say,
well, long going to wash these things at this temperature, you just throw everything through
there.
Yeah, you don't have any choice in what temperature is all prescribed for you.
You're just basically putting them on the tray and sliding them through, pulling the
door down and then it washes them and you lift the door up and pull them out.
Yes, and I will say one of my dreams though is to have one of those in my home.
I can't remember what they're called, but they're wonderful.
It's pretty great.
Yeah, it just washes everything like super fast.
So that's the dynamic areas, right?
Yes.
There's also the static areas where it's things like, well, the dishwasher area actually
apparently is a static area.
It doesn't change very much where you store cleaning products, that kind of stuff.
I guess you get points deducted if you're cleaning products or your toxic chemicals are
not in their marked original package.
Yeah, that's not good.
Because they can be mistaken for oil and vinegar or something like that.
Yeah, and they're going to check the static areas include a lot of things that you don't
think would even fall into the purview of a restaurant inspector.
They're going to look at your HVAC systems and your vents and your smoke detectors.
They're going to look at your dining room and the floors and the ceilings and your ceiling
fans and your dumpster behind and then your grease trap.
Like they look at everything.
Right.
Which is good and another one that they take a look at that I think is probably a big
problem for restaurants in a lot of ways are ice machines.
There's a lot of parts to ice machines that are out of view.
This thing scared me in mental plots now.
That can grow mold pretty easy.
And not just the ice machine where they're scooping ice out, which is another thing too.
They're better be an ice scoop, right?
You can grow mold in the ice machine, but also those shoots where ice comes out of like
a beverage dispenser.
Those are usually serviced by the company that makes the beverages that it's dispensing.
And so it will be up to that company to clean those out, which means that they get even
less attention than the rest of the restaurant.
So the next time you're getting ice out of beverage dispenser, get your flashlight out
of your pocket and look up there and see if you see any mold and then just raise holy
hell if you do.
Yeah, and I'm not a big fan of the serve yourself, soft drink stations anyway.
For you know, out there with the public, I don't think the public should ever have access
to something.
That's why, well, that's not the reason, but buffets are just so gross and creepy.
I haven't been to a buffet and good Lord, I don't know, 20 years.
Yeah, I know.
The thought of a buffet, I know they have the sneeze guard, but people like scooping
in and serving themselves their own food from a trough is so weird and gross and archaic
that I can't believe people still do that.
Well, I mean also, like even if you're using like a spoon, like a serving spoon to scoop
something out, which you are.
So did the person before you, right?
And that means you're touching the same serving spoon and then going back and using your
hands to go eat.
So you just touched whatever the other person had on their hands and now you're coming
in contact with your mouth.
It's a flawed system for sure.
It is because what you're saying is I'm going to count on the 300 people that have eaten
here today before me are all completely hygienic.
All their hands have been washed.
Yeah, Timothy Poup-Hands isn't among them.
No one did a single gross thing like if a tater tot fell off the spoon, flicked it back
in with their finger.
Like no one did anything wrong at all.
I just, no way.
Not even like whole foods are someplace.
Those are all gross to me.
Oh, yeah.
Whole foods would count with that too, huh?
Although I do like a build your own salad thing every once in a while.
That's the exception.
Good salad bar.
Yeah.
It's tough to turn down.
I'm with you.
Well, let's take a break.
I think a little more about salads and we'll be right back.
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All right, we're back, Charles.
Let's talk about point deductions, eh?
Yes, let's remember we said that restaurant inspectors are very optimistic and they start
out with a hundred.
It just goes down from there.
And again, since these are done like city by city or county by county, like everybody
has their own methods or whatever.
Yeah.
And I think the FDA has pointed out like there are five things that you're really looking
for, like five general categories.
Improper storage of food as far as temperature goes.
An adequately cooked food, equipment that's contaminated, sources that are unsafe supply
of the ingredients, right?
So like if it turns out like the goat is coming from their buddy's farm, that might be a
problem.
And then personal hygiene of the people who work there, right?
And so depending on some of those, especially if there's multiple ones of these, these are
big ones.
They will probably be a high priority, type one or critical violation.
Any of those?
Yes.
And then there's also other ones where like this is not that big of a deal, but it's definitely
something that needs to be paid attention to.
Those fall after those usually and it can be anything from like a dentic hand that could
conceivably contain botulism, but definitely hasn't been proven to contain botulism being
thrown away to there being a hole in the screen door that's left open for some reason.
Yeah, and these as far as deducting individual points that you'll see on the wall when you
walk in.
And if you don't look at that piece of paper when you walk into a restaurant, I don't
know what's going on in your brain, you should always do that.
But like a static violation like, hey, there were some chairs that had bad legs.
Your ceiling fan was pretty dusty.
Those would be like a point each.
Maybe a couple of points for a minor infraction.
Like your cleaning product, like I found a roach, you know, the chef has a cell phone
in the kitchen.
That's a couple of points.
All the way up to four and five points.
And those, that's when you're talking about your fridge is broken and it is not up to
temperature and everything in there is at risk.
And that's when they can actually shut you down until you get it fixed.
Yeah, which I got the impression from this article that that is, it's a rarity that
the health inspector wants to err on the side of the restaurant staying open and solving
everything as quickly as it can while also it's business not suffering unnecessarily.
So if your restaurant gets shut down temporarily, like that violation was significant enough
that people were at an immediate risk of getting sick from visiting your restaurant.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's a big deal in other words.
It's as big a deal as you would think.
Yeah.
But with those point deductions, if you go in and you see like a 72 on a restaurant score
sheet, it's probably not 28 individual small violations.
There are probably some four and five pointers in there.
And you should probably think about eating there or you know, it says in this article, you
can go to the website and really break down because those aren't for the public to necessarily
be able to digest easily.
But if you do look at them, if you can get close to them, you can actually look and see
the little category for each thing, sometimes behind the register, they may not like you
poking around.
Well, the health departments usually put them on the web these days.
Yeah, that's what saying.
You can investigate online.
But in the restaurant itself, it is marked.
It's a bunch of tiny little letters and categories.
And you can give it a look and you know, as long I wouldn't spend too much time there.
Just go by that initial score and if you're really like, yeah, I got to see what those
18 points were deducted for, I would just turn around and walk out.
Right, yeah.
Especially if there's an identical place like right across the street.
Yeah.
But that is a pretty good point because when you think about it, most people just see
that big score prominently displayed, whether it's like a A or a B or a C or like a 85
or a 98 or whatever.
And it's not really meant to be shorthand for the public.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess it isn't a way where it's like, hey, buddy, you're really taking a gamble
here at like 75.
But when it's really high up, it does seem to be kind of an indicator like this one's
A, okay, in my book.
That's not really what the restaurant inspection report is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be a lot more granular than that.
And so to really tell whether you're running a risk at eating in a restaurant or not, you
actually do have to go to the trouble of looking up what the vibe.
