Long Beach’s Grading System Gets Low Marks From Restaurateurs

Some Long Beach restaurant owners have a beef with their city’s new restaurant report card system, which they claim is unfairly dishing the dirt on some local eateries.

Instead of assigning letter grades, the system tells diners if the Long Beach health department forced their favorite hangout to take any “corrective action” as part of a routine sanitation inspection. Critics say it’s a process that magnifies mistakes without differentiating between small problems and big ones.

“I’ve had some restaurant owners tell me they’ve had customers come up to the door, then turn around and walk away after reading the inspection report,” said Mary Coburn, executive director of Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Assn. “The violation might be minor, but all the customer sees is ‘dirty restaurant’ . . . because the form doesn’t give any detail.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In January, Long Beach officials began requiring the city’s 2,000 or so restaurants, supermarkets and other food vendors to post their health inspection summaries where customers can see them.

If that sounds a lot like the system implemented last year in Los Angeles County, that’s because it is, according to Diana Bonta, executive director of the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services. She said Long Beach, which maintains a health department separate from the county’s, couldn’t ignore the firestorm that erupted a year and a half ago after a TV news investigation exposed squalid conditions at some Southland restaurants.

A public outcry forced Los Angeles County health officials to stiffen enforcement and require food retailers to begin posting their letter-grade sanitation scores publicly--a system that’s loathed by the restaurant industry but loved by the dining public.

Long Beach officials decided to follow suit and implement their own public report card system, but with one important difference. Instead of a letter grade or numeric score, the report is a checklist summary of 14 sanitation areas, such as food preparation, employee hygiene and pest control. If any violation is found, the health inspector simply checks the box in front of that category to let customers know corrective action was needed. Consumers have the right to see a copy of the full inspection, which restaurant management must produce if asked.

The city decided to eschew letter grades or numeric scores after a year of discussions and input from the local restaurant industry, Bonta said. The goal is to promote education and compliance, instead of making restaurateurs sweat it out worrying about a specific score. So far, about 60% of all the restaurants inspected have been required to take some steps to improve their establishments, she said.

“Our philosophy is not to catch [restaurant employees] doing something wrong but to work with them to have the best restaurant possible,” Bonta said.

Ironically, that Montessori approach is putting some restaurateurs on the defensive because the report card leaves more to diners’ imagination than a letter grade, according to Mike Kissel, environmental health compliance specialist for CKE Restaurants, which operates five Carl’s Jr. shops in Long Beach.

For example, a restaurant with a filthy meat slicer could get a black mark under “Equipment Sanitation and Maintenance” if the health department spotted it and ordered the eatery to clean it up. That same box could be checked if the slicer were sparkling clean but in disrepair. Diners would probably be more disturbed by the former, but most aren’t going to take the time to find out the details, Kissel said.

“It sends the wrong message to the public . . . that you’ve got a much bigger problem than what is really going on,” he said. “If we had to choose between grading and the summary, we’d choose grading.”

Bonta conceded her department is feeling the heat from some local restaurateurs to change the report card, but she’s encouraging everyone to give the thing a chance. In the meantime, her department is adding inspectors and beefing up education and outreach in a bid to get restaurant owners on board.

“The bottom line is protecting the public,” Bonta said. “They have a right to know.”