TRAVERSE CITY —
Connie Hoes just wanted a restaurant with good food and a short wait after a tiring, hot day of exploring Traverse City.
The notion of checking a local restaurant’s record of health inspections online didn’t necessarily occur to the visitor from Sacramento, but she liked the possibility.
“It’s not a bad idea, especially if you lived here or were new in town,” Hoes said.
Grand Traverse County posts online inspection reports for about 400 restaurants, school cafeterias, church kitchens, and mobile food vendors. The county launched the site last year, but it hasn’t yet generated much traffic.
Restaurant patrons offered a mixed reaction when asked about the site’s usefulness, but they were unanimous on one point: They’ve never visited it and didn’t know it existed.
“Everything’s getting posted somewhere these days; it’s just a question of finding it,” said Traverse City resident Tom Pritchard.
Restaurant health inspection information belongs online, Pritchard said, but he’s not sure if he would use it.
Plymouth resident Bill Strand frequently visits Traverse City, but said he’d have no interest in checking out restaurant inspection reports.
“You can tell walking in the door if a restaurant is good or not,” Strand said.
A poll by the National Restaurant Association listed food safety as the top issue among restaurant patrons, said Fred Laughlin, director of the Great Lakes Culinary Institute in Traverse City. But he questioned the need to post inspection reports online.
“I think it’s a little grandstanding. I think most people can tell if a restaurant is clean,” Laughlin said. “You just aren’t in business very long if you run a dirty restaurant.”
Restaurant owner Jamie Washburne likes the site. He said it indicates the local health department is just as tough with his competitors as they are with his Scalawags Whitefish & Chips off State Street downtown.
“There are a lot of citations for a lot of the same things,” Washburne said. “Sometimes the health department can get very picky ... but they are good and it’s always a learning experience.”
The county’s online inspection reports date to 2010, and Washburne said the reports reflect the pride he takes in his kitchen. Scalawags had no violations in its last inspection.
Few restaurants escape without some violations, said Tom Buss, the county’s director of environmental health.
Dirt, itself, qualifies as a non-critical violation, county records show. More severe violations often involve concerns about the spread of illness by human contact or bacterial growth in old or mishandled food.
A common critical violation is the failure to label ready-to-eat foods such as salsa or dressings with a discard date, or failure to discard the food after 7 days, Buss said.
The bacteria listeria can begin to grow in refrigerated food after seven days, Buss said.
“Another big one is bare-handed contact with prepared foods,” Buss said.
Food service establishments must immediately correct critical violations or submit to a follow-up inspections within 10 days. Continued violations or failure to correct critical violations results in an informal compliance conference with the health department.
“Normally we have very good results in the compliance conferences,” Buss said. “If it gets to the next level, it’s a big deal.”
The county hasn’t taken a food service establishment to the next level, a formal hearing, in almost two decades.
Region
Related Photos
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(Record-Eagle/Jan-Michael Stump) "I use this white one (cutting board) for nothing but fish," said Scalawags owner Jamie Washburne while preparing whitefish filets. Washburne also said his Traverse City restaurant stores fish scraps in the cooler until the night before garbage collection to keep it from smelling.
Local restaurants' health ratings online
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