Adventures at C level

My neighborhood cafe now has a C on the window, like an advertisement for death.

I don’t eat at Cs. I’ll eat at a B. I can forgive a B. I can even learn to love a B. But a C means vermin have taken over the restaurant; they’ve declared Tuesdays Vermin Night, two vermin eat for the price of one. Later on, when things get really wild, they all do vermin karaoke.

At home, where I guess I would give my kitchen a B, I got to thinking. I like the food at my neighborhood breakfast place. OK, so the place got tarnished with a C. Who among us has not had our C moments, even our C years? Besides, wasn’t this when the restaurant needed me the most? Couldn’t any poseur walk into an A? Didn’t it take a man of a certain character to patronize a C?

So I went back. It was around 10 a.m. on a weekday. The place was mostly empty. I ordered scrambled eggs with roasted garlic and goat cheese. I ordered chicken sausage. I’m not saying I was guarding a relief agency in Basra, but some of us show our bravery in subtler, more everyday ways. Afterward I felt fine, good but not great. B-ish.

The regular waitress, who is definitely not a C, and who is one of the reasons I like going to my neighborhood cafe, said the whole C grade had to do with a clogged toilet in the women’s bathroom.

She made it sound like bad luck, and I guess in a way it was; the county health inspector shows up unannounced, discovers a clogged toilet and forces you to close down (if my bathroom at home backed up, would I close my kitchen to the public? Oh yeah, I don’t have a public).

The clogged toilet discovery happened on Oct. 8. On Oct. 9, the inspector came back and found both toilets were backed up amid a host of other infractions. Boom, the scarlet C went on the window.

“I might have to get another job,” the waitress said, referring to how much the C had hurt business since then.

Among her few customers were two actors sitting at separate tables. They both happened to be reading scripts ahead of auditions later in the day.

“They’re cooking eggs here, it’s a pretty self-contained food,” said David Gray, seemingly unperturbed by the grade.

That egg comment was pretty convincing, but information is power. So I got the L.A. County Health Department’s report on my cafe (which restaurants are supposed to make available to all customers upon request). Inspection scores start at 100, then points get taken away for various violations. A score below 80 earns you a C. My cafe, by the time the inspection was through, got a 78.

What for? “Observed toilets overflowing due to sewage line backup,” one note said. There was a problem with another sink in a food preparation area. Points were deducted for raw food improperly stored next to ready-to-eat food in the walk-in refrigerator. There were other, more minor infractions -- a door left ajar causing a low-risk possibility of vermin contamination.

I asked Terrance Powell, chief environmental health specialist with the L.A. County Health Department, if he would eat at a C. “I eat at some C restaurants,” he said. “What I do, and what I would hope the readers would do is, if they have a question [about a restaurant], look at the outward signs. Is the place clean? Is my food hot?”

Powell also encouraged the public to ask for a copy of a restaurant’s last inspection report.

“The grade is but one tool in a consumer toolbox,” he said.

As for my cafe, a third inspection, on Oct. 22, found everything had been corrected. They’re eligible to have the C removed in February. Meanwhile, I’ll still eat there. It’s a scary job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Paul Brownfield can be contacted at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.