Mar 26, 2007 7:06 pm US/Eastern
NYC Restaurants May Soon Get Letter Grades
Sen. Klein Pushing Hard To Clean Up Fractured System
by Chris Wragge
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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Last month's fiasco at area KFC/Taco Bell and Pizza Hut restaurants have prompted a senator to take matters into his own hands. If Sen. Jeff Klein gets his way, all NYC restaurants will soon get letter grades.
CBS
We all know about school grades. If one local politician gets his way there will be health inspection grades at your favorite restaurant.
But what do diners think of the restaurant report cards?
Bronx Sen. Jeff Klein said cleaning up New York City restaurants, like the infamous rat-infested, Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell, is as easy as A, B, C.
"If we start grading restaurants on sanitary conditions it's going to have a chilling effect," Klein said.
Restaurant report cards are common in cities like Los Angeles, where letter grades are displayed on doors and windows as prominently as the menus.
"No restaurant in the city of New York is going to want to have an "F" in the doorway of their restaurant," Klein said.
But right now, many would, according to Klein, who looked at city health inspection records for 700 restaurants and found 56 percent of those failing, were cited for pest infestation -- with 40 percent of those having a history of multiple failures since 2004.
"The problem is the public never knows," Klein said.
How would you know if your favorite place to eat is serving up unsanitary conditions?
"You don't know, you can't tell until you see the rats on TV," Klein said.
The New York City and Suffolk County health departments do post restaurant inspection reports on their Web sites, but many diners we spoke said letter grades just might blow the lid of bad food in New York.
"Seeing it in the window would be a really big help also," one person said.
Added another: "So that people know, right when they, they don't have take time and for people like me who didn't know it was online."
The Restaurant Association and the Health Department have said a grading system could leave customers confused because it's vague and it may not accurately depict the cleanliness of a restaurant over time.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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