I had a conversation over Shavuot with someone who works nearby my office in midtown and we were discussing some of local eateries in the area. When I brought up Kosher Delight he mentioned that a coworker of his showed him a health code document citing the restaurant for numerous violations.
Lo and behold, he was right.
According to the NYC’s Department of Health’s website, KD’s recent inspection on 05/05/2006 turned up a whopping 33 violations1 including the disturbing indictments of “Facility not vermin proof. Harborage or conditions conducive to vermin exist” and “Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.”
This will come as no surprise to some people – Shosh once found teeth marks on a packet of BBQ sauce – but I can’t help but feel more than a little unnerved. This is hardly the first time a Kosher restaurant has been cited for such violations, and others have been forced to close altogether. Aside from the potential hillul hashem involved, such violations make people question the point of keeping kosher especially in understanding why it is more important for food to be separated from utensils than it is to be kept away from rodents.
Although it will never happen, I think it would be nice to have the Kashrut agencies keep up with the Health Code and to have their hashgachot dependant on compliance. Not only would this force restaraunts to follow dina d’malchuta and clean up their establishments, but it would also avoid creating the perception that the NYC Health Code is somehow a “higher standard” of food preperation.
In the meantime, I’ll be bagging lunch for a while…
1. Note that this is only for the KD in midown. The one on 13th Ave in Brooklyn had 6 currently unspecified violations from their November inspection and all were addressed. The one on Ave J had two violations in December which were addressed.
(כִּי לֹא מַחְשְׁבוֹתַי מַחְשְׁבוֹתֵיכֶם וְלֹא דַרְכֵיכֶם דְּרָכָי (ישעיהו נה:ח
Not-So-Kosher Certification
June 5, 2006 Food
Yes, all the information is available on the city’s website. I posted about this a few months ago – amazingly, Prime Grill fared much worse than some of the greasier joints that you would expect to do poorly.
Sorry I missed the post – I would have saved some money and that lingering queasy feeling.
I was suprised to see that Va Bene had 31 violations! Never going there again.
I also posted about this about a month ago, but note that I don’t think that 33 violation points = 33 violations, etc. I believe each violation is assigned a point value, and that anything that anything above 28 requires a compliance inspection. So a place with a point value of 31 may only have six or seven violations, if that makes you feel any better, and is only a few points above what the city considers an acceptable number of violations. It is also interesting to note that when studies have been conducted of people in their own kitchens, they often violate food safety rules such as keeping food out at room temperature for too long, contaminating countertops with raw chicken or raw eggs, not vermin-proofing the flour or sugar in their pantry, etc.
I would be curious to know if kosher establishments actually have more violations than non-kosher establishments of a similar style–that is, greasy, neighborhoody kinds of places. I know that Jews like to talk about how terrible kosher restaurants are (and they are!), but I’m not convinced they’re worse than similar non-kosher restaurants. There are just fewer nice or mid-priced ones, so a large percentage of kosher restaurants are of the greasy, neighborhoody sort.
orthomom,
The Prime Grill has ZERO violations as of 4/4/06
Click Here For More Info
ALG is pretty much on the mark: household kitchens would generally fare worse than most greasy spoons (do you wash your fleishig cutting boards with bleach after each use?), and vermin are ubiquitous in food storage areas.
In fact, fancy restaurants often have more violations, since they’re serving meat and poultry individually made to order, and might well not cook them all the way through (chicken cooked to 160-180F internal, as per requirements, is going to be hideously dry). You might be pulling strange things out of your burger at KD, but you can be sure that it’s never going to be undercooked.
As far as I’m concerned, the pickled mango sauce at the shawarma station covers a multitude of sins anyway…
I think that bugs in food is a kashrut violation. If memory serves the product of s/t non-kosher is in fact non-kosher–the exception to the rule being bee honey–so wouldn’t say rat droppings make the burger traif?–and if so, what about the utensisls used in’t preperation ie. spatula, or the oven/flat frying surface. In short, are droppings a notai ta’am?
oh yea–EEWWWWWWWW!
I also posted about this a while back after OM did, noting specifically the ones in Queens.
Surprisingly, Kosher pizza places did far better than average, while the fancier restaurants didn’t do as well, except Levana’s in the city which got a perfect 0.
Also, as someone else noted, it’s important to check what their scores are now. A restaurant can go from 32 to 6 in a day if they clean it up and call in the inspectors.
Actually, this has nothing to do with kosher vs. treif or expensive vs. cheap. The most expensive treif restaurants in NYC often fare quite poorly on these inspections:
Le Bernadain ($150-200 for dinner) ranked 23 points, while Alaine Ducasse ($175-225) got 19. Meanwhile, Pizza Cave had a 7 and Dougies 11. Solo got a 2.
But yeah; Efrex and ALG got it right; most of the violations aren’t that serious, change from day to day, and however bad their kitchen is, yours is almost definitely worse.
PS: Except ‘Danny and Pepper Jerk Express’ in Brooklyn. Not only is it treif, but at 193 points, it should probably be rezoned as a biohazard.
A couple of years ago I was with some friends outside Kosher Delight on 34th steet and the pizza store right next door was closed but through the window I could see at least a dozen mice running around it really put me off and I haven’t eaten at KD since.