Serving Up the Status Quo in O.C. Restaurants

Say what you want about Orange County, up until now, it always had this: It was clean. Even bankrupt, it had a scrubbed, hygienic order that you could actually feel, crossing in from Greater-and-Grittier Los Angeles. One minute, the sensation of grime would be thick enough for core sampling, and the next, the strip malls would be glistening like plate glass in a Windex commercial. It was comforting, in a Joan Crawford sort of way.

No longer. Oh, Orange County still looks fresh enough by Los Angeles standards (What doesn’t?), but lately its white glove image has seriously slipped.

First, its surf turns out to be Santa Monica-style funky. Then a plague of needles washes up onto Huntington Beach. And now comes the news that 859 complaints last year from writhing, vomiting people who claimed they got sick in Orange County restaurants are still not compelling enough to justify the initiation of restaurant letter grades from health inspectors.

Not that cleanliness is the be-all and end-all, but something about this most recent restaurant business smacked, last week, of a final straw.

“Welcome to O.C.,” a friend there wisecracked after the letter grade proposal got the brushoff from county lawmakers. “If the beach don’t getcha, then the bistros will.”

He had no illusions; he knows there are no ironclad shields against the dark forces of salmonella and E. coli. But those posted ABCs have been, for diners in Riverside, San Diego and most of Los Angeles counties, even more comforting than well-scrubbed views.

Yes, there are downsides: Letter grades are a blunt and sometimes unforgiving instrument, and wily restaurateurs can probably counterfeit them if they work at it. But there’s something about a one-letter cleanliness critique, right there in the restaurant window. It says that someone, somewhere remembered that not even comfort food is necessarily as comforting as it looks.

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California has a reputation as the nation’s produce basket, but eating here has become, increasingly, a leap of faith. As the suburbs have spread, so has the citified notion that every meal will be well-scrubbed and hygienic. The understanding is that--from field to truck to factory or slaughterhouse to supplier to kitchen to table--what’s put in front of us is unimpeachably clean.

It isn’t, of course. (An observation rooted, regrettably, in personal experience; as God is my witness, I’ll never eat health food in Fullerton again.) An old boyfriend who worked once at a supermarket used to obsessively wash every morsel he brought home to his kitchen. Asked why, he once replied: “If I told you, you’d want to starve yourself.”

Los Angeles County’s restaurant rating system was initiated after a TV news crew aired graphic footage of roach-speckled restaurant kitchens. San Diego County has been posting letter grades since the mid-1940s. Though food industry people like to claim that the letters give customers a false sense of security, they in fact seem to have the opposite effect.

Regardless of the letter, the very presence of the posting reminds consumers that that peppered ahi with the baby greens and the wasabi mashed yucca (or whatever) didn’t just materialize. It says: Think about where this came from. Ask yourself whether, say, that busboy in the doorway genuinely has an incentive to keep your safety in mind.

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People with profit margins and payrolls get nervous when too much is made of such questions, and the energy with which the food industry lobbied against grades in Orange County was to be expected. But then came the disturbing news, from The Times’ David Reyes and Jean O. Pasco, that the county’s own health officials were so buddy-buddy with the restaurant owners that they were quietly coaching them in how best to deep-six the plan.

The public hearing before the county’s Board of Supervisors was all-industry. No consumers spoke. What passed was convoluted at best. Basically, there’ll be no posted grades, only window stickers reflecting pass-fail inspections. If customers want more information, they’ll have to look it up on a Web site. Either that, or ask for the most recent report at the restaurant door, and then enjoy an appetizer of health inspection fine print.

That isn’t enough, even with a new hotline and special awards for restaurants that pass muster repeatedly. There’s something uncomfortable about the way Orange County ended up giving the food industry the higher priority. This is a massive region, with throngs of hungry people who eat all over. Southern Californians shouldn’t have to navigate multiple inspection systems just to know whether they’re risking food poisoning. Memo to Sacramento: How about a statewide system of letter grades next session? No, it wouldn’t be perfect, but consistency is, well, so clean.

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.