Philly restaurant inspections keep patrons in the dark

When it comes to food-safety inspections, the Philadelphia Health Department does its best to keep the public out of the way and in the dark. The department's motto should be: "Trust us. Everything is fine."

But is it fine?

City Paper's examination of how Philadelphia's inspection system actually works shows a process that favors restaurant operators over the patrons it is supposed to protect.

Other cities have implemented policies to inform the public about restaurant food safety. In New York and Los Angeles, for instance, health departments grade and score restaurants. The grades, ranging from A to D, must be posted on eatery windows.

In Philadelphia, Health Department officials say they don't like the grade/scoring system and have no intention of adopting it. They see it as too adversarial and say they prefer to work with restaurants — as opposed to, say, with consumers.

To meet open-record requirements, the department does post its inspection reports on its website. These forms, thick in bureaucratese, address 56 items that indicate whether a restaurant is in compliance with the sanitary code. 

Though a City Paper analysis of inspection reports of the city's nearly 3,900 eat-in restaurants found 77 percent rated average or better in cleanliness performance — including many of the best-known restaurants in Center City — the remainder, nearly 1,000 restaurants, fared worse or much worse than average. Many of these were small, neighborhood eateries.

But beyond the ratings, the larger questions we examined are these: Does the city-inspection system work? Do all restaurants meet the basic standards of food safety?

The department's answer is yes — citing its frequent inspections and its protocol of escalating enforcement actions. Those actions can lead to the city taking a restaurant to Common Pleas Court, where a judge has the power to revoke a food license if serious violations are not corrected.

The department's records indicate the city Law Department has filed 298 civil suits involving restaurants in the last five years. Yet, we found no license revocations in our review of cases. Jeff Moran, spokesman for the Health Department, said in an email response to our question about that: "From our experience, a business entity elects to correct all violations to stay in business so there is not a need to revoke their license."

The department's own data tell a different story.

Into each restaurant's life, some violations do fall. Rarely does a restaurant go through an inspection without getting cited for some failures. Most are quick to correct them. After all, running a clean kitchen should be a central tenant of all chefs. As one restaurant owner put it: "You aren't giving the food away, you are selling it to people. This is your business. You have an obligation to run it properly."

But, our review shows that over the last five years, about one in four of the city's restaurants have had difficulties in correcting violations. Of these 1,000 restaurants, about 275 have had significant and repeated violations at some point over the same time period.

In short, these restaurants can't seem to get it right.

When a restaurant fails two inspections in a row the Health Department's protocol calls for it to file a civil suit in Common Pleas Court. But the data shows that suits are not always filed after two failed inspections, and when they are, the system begins to churn. Court hearings are delayed repeatedly. Cases hang without resolution.

The data shows that court hearings can be delayed multiple times — even as many as 13 times — while the department re-inspects and re-inspects.

The result is that troubled restaurants can go for years without resolving their violations. They keep operating. The department keeps inspecting. The violations don't go away.

To put it another way, if you are a restaurant operator intent on ignoring the violations or if you simply cannot get your act together, you can continue to operate.

And the cost of getting it wrong is minimal. Unlike many cities, where restaurants that violate the sanitary code are fined by the department or the courts, there are no fines in Philadelphia. In New York City, for example, there are fines ranging from $300 to $1,000 for each outstanding violation.

In Philadelphia, the only additional cost a restaurant must face is the $315 charge the department makes for each additional inspection after the first two, which are conducted at no cost. If they end up before a judge, they could also be ordered to pay court costs.

If you are a restaurant taking in, say, $80,000 in receipts a month, a $315 fee is negligible.

There are other instances where the theory and the reality differ. If an in­spector discovers a serious problem during an inspection, he will tell the restaurant to cease and desist operations until it is corrected. "A cease and desist order is never ignored," says the Health Department's Moran.

Yet, the department's own data show these orders are sometimes ignored. As one inspector dryly noted in his report on one restaurant: "Management indicates that they will remain open despite this sanitarian's recommendation to close."

There are examples in the narrative of inspection reports that indicate a restaurant has remained open, despite the fact that the department can and will call in Licenses and Inspections, which controls licensing of restaurants, to deliver an official cease and desist order.

Our reporting team could not tell exactly how many restaurants stayed open because the language in the inspection report is not clear, and officials repeatedly gave us incorrect or incomplete answers to our questions.

An example: We first were told that all restaurants in the city are inspected at least once a year. The department's own data show that while the number of inspections has increased greatly since 2009, it is not at 100 percent.

Department officials assured us their website database included all inspections for the last five years. Then we found examples of restaurants inspected in 2011 where violations were found. Procedure says the inspector should have returned within 30 days to re-inspect. The data showed no re-inspection.

When we asked department officials about these cases, we were told — late in our reporting — that there was a period in 2012 and 2013 when the department was shorthanded and re-inspections were not entered into the system. We asked how many cases were involved. We have yet to receive a reply.

Faced with outside scrutiny, the department reacted as bureaucracies often do — by assuming a fetal position and seeking to wait out the intrusion into its business.

Not to worry. Despite the questions, despite the conflicts between protocols and practice, despite the failure to help the public by offering public scores or letter grades, the department has a clear message for all of you:
Trust us. Everything is fine.