Restaurants Call Health Inspection Web Site Unfair - NYTimes.com

Restaurants Call Health Web Site Unfair

By DIANE CARDWELL

The new requirement that New York City’s 24,000 restaurants prominently display letter grades for cleanliness has provoked dire predictions that would-be customers will flee when they see a big green B or dreaded yellow C in the window.

But while health department officials have only begun the yearlong process of assigning the grades, a potentially more powerful — and, restaurateurs say, misleading — tool is already in use: a health department Web site that has made a wealth of older inspection data easily accessible.

Suddenly, a restaurant’s past lapses are at the fingertips of patrons, who can call up a quick roster of not only the top-scoring places, but also the lowest-ranked — including details of some health violations that may have been remedied, and some that would no longer be considered violations under the new inspection rules.

People who “take the time to go on the Web site will certainly get the wrong impression as to what a restaurant, if they were inspected in June or April or May, what the real score would be” under the new system, said Jeremy Merrin, who owns three Havana Central restaurants in Manhattan.

Although much of the information has been available for several years on the Web site of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the new site (nyc.gov/health/restaurants) allows much easier and more refined searches, by elements like ZIP code, cuisine or the first letter of a restaurant name.

It allows searches by the range of scores. There is even a pop-up window called a widget that other consumer Web sites, like OpenTable or Zagat.com, can post to link to the search engine

Restaurants Call Health Inspection Web Site Unfair - NYTimes.com.