Here’s Some Reasons Why Health Inspectors Don’t Eat Out Much

Question: Let’s say you are inspecting a restaurant. Do you tell them you’re coming?

Answer: Oh no. You walk in, you introduce yourself if they don’t already know who you are, and you tell them you’re there for an inspection. You walk into the kitchen as quickly as you can and start looking around to see if you can find violations of codes.

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Q. What do you look for?

A. Oh, rats, roaches, food handling problems, food temperature problems--anything that could cause food poisoning or related to a food poisoning or food handling problem.

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Q. Do you find a lot of problems?

A. The majority of places that you go to, you’re going to find something. If they’re really, really minor, then we will tell them to correct it and then not go back until the next inspection. But they would have to be extremely minor. Some minor cleaning maybe in cracks and crevices in the corners.

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Q. Is it ever considered minor if you just see some rodent droppings but not very much?

A. No. Rodent droppings are pretty major. Whether they get closed down right away would depend on how many we see. But any vermin, cockroaches, rats--those are considered pretty major.

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Q. What’s the worst thing you ever found?

A. I’ve walked into a kitchen and they were scraping the roaches off the food to cut up the meat. I’ve seen them preparing food in the back yard and throwing the slop on the ground outside. I’ve seen them changing babies’ diapers on the same table as they’re preparing the food. I’ve seen live rats in restaurants. You name it, you see it.

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Q. Do you see it in fancy restaurants as well as less upscale places?

A. Where I work, in and around Van Nuys, I don’t have a lot of fancy restaurants. But with all honesty, you may consider them fancy but the back of them are all pretty much the same. It’s just a kitchen. They may have a chef and they may have a fry cook, but they’re all pretty much the same.

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Q. And they’re just as likely to be scraping the cockroaches off the meat?

A. Yeah. Just as likely to have the same crazy problems. I did a market down in Compton where I opened up the walk-in cooler that they hadn’t used in a couple of weeks and there were live mice everywhere. They were nesting. There were baby mice everywhere. I’ve gone through warehouses where it was such a bad infestation that as you’re throwing out the 50-pound sacks of flour you find little nests of baby mice in there.

I’d say three-fourths of them have vermin problems if they haven’t had an inspection in a while.

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Q. Where was it that you saw them scraping the cockroaches off the meat?

A. It happened to be a Thai restaurant. But you could walk in and see a typical California-style restaurant and they could be immaculate in the back or they could be a disaster area.

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Q. What do you do when you see something like that?

A. If they have something that’s going to cause immediate danger to the people who are eating there, then we would do something immediately about it. It could either be a closure or it could be just a citation and a hearing notice. If you’ve been there in the past and it’s a repeat violation, they could go to a permit-suspension hearing.

This particular restaurant, I closed them on site, threw away a lot of food. They were closed for about two and a half weeks.

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Q. How do you tell them you’re going to close them right away?

A. We try to get them to voluntarily close down. We prefer that. That way we feel that they understand the problem a little bit better.

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Q. So what would you say to try to get them to do that?

A. “You have a choice, basically. We can close you down or you can voluntarily close down. If you voluntarily close down, it’s probably a little easier to get your license and come back than if we have to order you to close down, bring you in for a hearing.”

If they’re just adamant that they are not going to close, we call your supervisor and tell them we’re going to have to suspend their permit.

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Q. And do you go into the room where people are eating and say, “OK, everybody out”?

A. No. Normally, we wouldn’t kick everybody out of there. We let the people that are there finish eating whatever they were eating and then we tell them, “Don’t prepare any more food, don’t serve any more people.”

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Q. Your reaction isn’t, “Oh my God, nobody should eat any of this food, get them out?”

A. If they’re preparing food, we’ll make them throw it out. We won’t let them serve it. We’ll watch them throw it in the trash can, put bleach or some other chemical on it so they won’t serve it or won’t attempt to take it out of the trash can and serve it to somebody else.

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Q. What do the owners do when you tell them?

A. It depends on the owners. Some people are really apologetic, and the others tell you to get out.

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Q. Have some of them gotten pretty creative in trying to get you to change your mind?

A. Oh, very creative. You can get people trying to finagle their way out of anything.

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Q. What are some of the things people have tried or said to you?

A. “We just sprayed the day before, that’s why there are so many cockroaches--the spray makes them come out.” “If you give me a couple of hours there won’t be any left.” “You just came on a bad day, they’re not always like this.” Any number of things.

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Q. Do people ever try to pay you off?

A. Some people I guess have, yes.

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Q. What do they do? How do they say that?

A. It’s very subtle. They think it’s OK, I guess. It’s very common. They might just walk up to you and try to shake your hand and might have something in their hand.

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Q. What do they think they can buy you with?

A. Most of the time you can laugh at them--”You’re trying to corrupt me with a couple of hundred dollars? You’ve got to be kidding.”

You don’t even count it. You don’t even touch it. If you touch it, then there’s a problem. So you just back up with your hands up and walk away.

I think the public really thinks that it happens a lot, that inspectors are just paid off. It just doesn’t happen that much.

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Q. Is there any type of establishment that’s less likely to have a problem than any other? Is a bakery better than a market or restaurant?

A. No. It all depends on who is operating it. If they want to operate a good place, they’ll operate a good place.

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Q. Do you ever eat out?

A. Only if I know who the inspector is and I know that it’s clean. But most inspectors I don’t think eat out as often as most people in the public would. Unless you know the place.

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Q. Your husband is a health inspector, and many of your friends are too. What do you guys talk about at dinner parties?

A. Funny things that people do to try to get out of different things.

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Q. Like what?

A. Like experiences talking to vendors, street vendors especially, when you’re trying to take away their food or explain to them that they’re not allowed to do what they’re doing and they’ll yell at you and run with their cart, flying down the street, bells jingling, trying to get away from the health inspector.

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Q. What’s the worst experience you’ve ever had?

A. The riots were pretty bad. I was down at the Compton Fashion Center the day the riots happened. Getting back to the car was pretty bad, and then the aftermath was pretty bad. I had to go into the buildings that were burned out and try to discover what the odor problems were, hoping it wasn’t a dead body, but more hoping it was just decaying food.

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Q. Would you do this job again? Would you recommend it to people?

A. I would definitely recommend it to people. It’s a fun job to have.

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Q. But you’d have to stop eating out so much.

A. Yes, unless you know the inspector who works in the neighborhood you like to eat in.