1:10 If you're wondering why 98 is a bad score in NYC, it's because they (apparently) start at 0 and count up for violations, instead of 100 and counting down.
So a score of 2 is good in NY? In Toronto we do a three-colour system: PASS green meaning good, YELLOW some problems to be fixed but you can remain open, and RED fail shut down immediately or else.
Passing one is also easy. My former manager somehow always knows when an inspector is coming. We always score a perfect 100 from both the county and a thrid party one hired by corporate. My manager takes pride in being one of the most profitable locations in the district. His "innovative practices from over 3 decades of experience" include serving customers food that fell on the floor, covering up spoiled food with heavy sauces, and not washing vegetables. We use mystery liquids from the dollar store in our 3 component sink and only bust out the official stuff on inspection days. Same goes for our dissolvable date labels. I often get yelled at for "wasting company time" by insisting I wash my hands after going to the bathroom. Twice a month, the 2 shift supervisors forge temp logs with different colored pens and switch up their handwriting style. It's true that working in a restaurant makes you never want to eat in one again.
I worked at a Papa Johns years ago as a manager, one time a manager from another store came back into our prep area with a cockatiel on her shoulder. I told her like 5 times to get it out, she kept insisting it was fine, then it pooped on her shoulder.
I had a manager get fired from papa gino's bc he picked up a mouse he found outside while on smoke break and tried to bring it inside. The mouse jumped out of his pocket before he actually got inside
There was this little bowling ally snack bar that served lunches once a week. The place got a C rating, had to shut down for two weeks to get their act together, and when the inspector came back, he gave them a D. How they managed to make things _worse_ I have no idea.
Probably something that was so caked with filth that it was completely rotted away, but that wasn't visible because of the filth. They scrubbed all the gunk away from the base of the faucet and broke it off because it was rusted through, and then the kitchen didn't have a working sink. Or something equally bad, that just disintegrated when they tried to clean it.
It was a bacteria/all of the oil spills happening. It was established sometime in the 80s and since then tests have shown that gulf coast oysters are now fine to eat
I don't know about the gulf, but oysters are filter feeders, and if they live near the mouths of rivers, and untreated sewage ends up in the river, the oysters can pick up diseases like hepatitis A. It tends to be a problem with cities that have combined waste and storm water sewers, and during heavy rains, can get overwhelmed, and dump excess mixed sewage into rivers untreated. As for discovering the issue, if people go to the hospital for foodborne illness, it gets tracked, and they might get asked what and where they have eaten recently. If enough mention one food, it will be tested. In the case of shellfish and sewers, they can have preventative restrictions about which areas are allowed, or restrictions after heavy rains.
The soup kitchen my parents ran for 20 years had to get health inspections, and when they took over it never got anything less than a perfect score. Every single time, an absolutely perfect score. One time, there was a single problem (hot stuff going into the fridge before being cooled down), but dad went right down to the store, bought the thing they said to get, and they still gave us the perfect score. People have tried to get them shut down because they don't like poor and homeless people in the area, and restaurants don't like us giving out free food. Then one day, two months ago, they came in and there was a seagull in the kitchen. The city ordered us shut down. They'd been waiting for years for an excuse, and said we were 'vermin infested'. They refused to re-issue the permit to operate, and when they were closing it down, almost 60 people turned out to cheer as they put up the 'closed' sign for the last time, and yell at them. 20 years of perfect scores, but people thought the filthy subway two blocks away was a cornerstone of the community, despite all the drug deals going on in the parking lot.
@@AsteriskDatBoi Soup kitchen is, as of tomorrow, closed for good. First time it won't have opened in about 70 years. Some police were there to make sure no one was trying to hand out meals to the 'transients', as they call them. The place I live on the oregon coast is a tourist town, and the city wants everything not perfect to be swept under the rug.
@@AsteriskDatBoi The soup kitchen was volunteer. Cost a lot of money to keep open, some was paid by donations or the church tithe. All the people there came in on days off or took time off work to come in, cook, clean, serve meals, and hand out clothes, blankets and the like to those in need.
@@iainballas The way people and officials react to homeless people is honestly disgusting. They treat homeless and poor people as vermin rather than actual people. Its honestly heartbreaking to think about all the people who relied on that soup kitchen for food that will now have to find some alternative.....if they can that is..... People showing up to cheer your place being shut down is just sad....
I remember when I was in high school, we went to a Chinese buffet for a team dinner. The first time I ever saw a "C" score posted in a window. Never going to forget a lineman saying "I'm not going to a restaurant with the same letter as my GPA." We went instead to a local diner.
One thing you left out was the food prep sink. This is completely separate from hand washing and 3 part dish washing sinks. The food prep sink is used exclusively for food prep. There’s no soap in it. Can’t do that because that’s called chemical contamination. In the coolers, food has to be stored a certain way. Raw meats have to be stored on the bottom shelf because they can drip juices. Storing them on higher shelves above vegetables is called cross contamination. Not washing your hands after handling raw meat and then working on vegetables is called cross contamination.
In the UK the local council inspects and scores businesses from 1-5 which has to be displayed on their door and online e.g. uber eats. I havent had food poisoning in over a decade, the system really cleaned things up as many customers refused to shop at places
@@adamheller7612It seems the local council pushes it as though it's a strict requirement but nationally in England it's not a legal requirement. Almost all of them display it and you can Google it online in 30seconds
One important thing that wasn’t mentioned in this video is that restaurants often pay for for 3rd party inspections, usually from NSF. These inspections are far more stringent and thorough than the regular inspection from the Health Department.
I work for a company that not only pays for a 3rd party to do inspections but that also has employees who are paid to do their own audits prior to the 3rd party inspections
I'm confused, why would they pay to undergo stricter inspections? Wouldn't they prefer the free inspection that's more likely to give them a high score?
I work for Jolt and we make software for every one of the companies in the chain that is doing these assessments. Fun to see the niche problem we build software for get a video. @@michaelkirschner7471
@@wta1518 Nah, just like with his TV shows, Gordon really plays up the drama for the American inspections. His UK inspections are much more level headed and include far fewer (but not 0) insults.
I worked for a major fast food chain, and the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed was the health inspector stopping counting when we were 1 point shy of being shut down. He came back 3 days later and gave us the same score.
@@DominicMV Health departments are general run by the county, not private companies. I was a private consultant that went into hundreds of restaurants... I didn't want them to fail, but I wasn't going to pretend they passed when they didn't. I was in one that got a couple minor marks by the health inspector. While they were writing up their report, I started my assessment - they failed within 30 seconds due to cockroach activity. There was significant cockroach and rodent activity as well as sewage leaking by their paper products... none of this was on the health report.
@@RAD6150 Generally but not all. I've been in management at enough restaurants to know that depending on the county, and other factors, the county will sublet the health inspections to private companies. More then once Steritech was the only "health inspector" that came in. And since they were our "Heath Guys" I've seen things that should have been major points just glazed over.
@@DominicMV Where is this? I have never heard of Steritech being subcontracted for government inspections. I have heard of places where health departments don't do their required inspections and Steritech or Ecosure are the only inspections they get... but they are still paid by the restaurant, not the county.
Here in Denmark the health inspector checks a number of areas, and the establishment is rated for the lowest score (1-4) overall. Meaning if you score 1 in one thing and 4 in everything else, you're rated 1. Additionally, if the establishment gets top score 12 months in a row, they get an elite grade. Also, when the establishment gets a poor result, the *establishment* has to pay the follow-up inspection
"You can tell a lot about a restaurant by the state of the toilets. It's a lot easier to keep a toilet clean than it is to keep a kitchen clean, and they let you *see* the toilets." -- "Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.
I dunno about that, usually drunk patrons don't waltz into the kitchen and diarrhea everywhere _except_ the toilet... Working in foodservice, once every 2 weeks minimum, someone will badly 'miss' the toilet and slink off without telling anyone. Patrons are filthy, disgusting animals sometimes.
That's why open-kitchen places are great, especially ones where you can watch them prepare your food. You can see the kitchen and not only assess the state of the food-prep area, but also how they handle the food and what precautions to food poisoning they take. If they are fairly lax and lazy, you can assume it's the same for keeping food stored at proper temperatures, cooking to the correct heats and other things.
@@Kaiimei Just because it looks clean doesn't mean much. You can give the illusion of cleanliness without actually being sanitary. Remember, dangerous foodborne illnesses are virtually undetectable by smell, taste or sight. If the don't use proper sanitizer, or keep good temperature discipline, you won't know until you get very ill.
Fun fact, most fast food companies you regularly eat at also have regular surprise inspections from companies they hire. At Chipotle we had audits from EcoSure, who in my experience were extremely thorough, and then occasional inspections by Chipotle's corporate Safety, Security, and Risk team (SSR), who were even more thorough and also looked at things outside of food safety, like building security, backup systems, cash handling, etc. Most restaurants score far lower on those third party and corporate inspections, and those are the ones the CEOs are looking at because, honestly, if your restaurant is decently run, it should be easy to pass a city health inspection.
It's hilarious that you included a picture of Tom's Restaurant in NYC at the beginning- it's right by my college campus, and last year there was a whole thing where they got exposed for faking their sanitation rating grade. They had an A grade posted but had actually gotten either a B or C, I don't remember.
As someone who works as a food safety specialist (someone who goes into kitchens and audits them ahead of time to prevent them from failing the health inspection), I appreciate the amount of information packed into your standard format. The only thing that was missing was how to calibrate the food thermometer.
Have to do that myself. And while not difficult, stirring a thermometer around in a cup of ice water without letting it touch the sides is extremely annoying
Also explaining the difference between calibrating and validating. Putting the probe into ice water or boiling water isn't calibrating, it's validating. Changing the set points so that ice water is 32f 0c and boiling is 212f 100c is calibrating. Very few modern thermometers need calibrating since they're digital thermocouples, not analog bimetalic coils.
@Meton2526 Or if it's an alcohol bulb thermometer, you're looking at deriving an error curve from 2 data points, to correct your readings. *note* this is according to vague memories of organic chem class 20 years ago. Opinion may contain significant errors.
@@CatFish107 That sounds right from my vague memories of chemistry classes, but probably outside the scope of what even a food service manager is going to be exposed to for their food safety licensing.
half the restaurants in nashville (you can look it up online) basically violated every single one at some point. One restaurant that cost $50 a plate we to, we looked it up later, the inspectors said "nobody there could comprehend the fundamentals of food safety" which given how normally dry and careful they are with what inspectors write in reports, means they were INCREDIBLY pissed. Cans of raid were found above the food table next to onions, for example.
@@sammiemmett9899 in this society, the cats are gonna need a pest control diploma from an accredited training institution to satisfy the gods of bureaucracy.
@@nicolethompson2399it would be nice if it were that simple. A lot of health inspectors form relationships with restaurants and let them do whatever the fuck they want while the inspector remains willfully ignorant (ie: they don’t look for violations and if they see them they ignore it) it’s not always this way but often is
@@cameron126651I'm intimately aware unfortunately. I just wasn't going to go that deep into it. But yeah tagging along with some health inspectors, I was appalled at what they let slide
He didnt go into this, but a lot of chains use software to perform self assesments each day to make sure they are good. I work at Jolt a company that builds that software. Really interesting stuff.
Keeping kitchens and pantries at 100% is what I do for a living! You hit most of the big points, but the huge one that gets missed the most often is keeping ice machines clean and sanitized. It's not easy to get all the way up inside some of the larger models.
One of my favorite restaurants got shut down temporarily due to failing an inspection. They posted the results of the test in the window and there was not a single item on the list that would've given me pause to eating there. Very few points were deducted on things would consider cleanliness related. It was mostly things about which direction the restroom door swings and where the entrance to the kitchen is.
Things that may be an impediment to timely evacuation during an emergency? There are probably good reasons that may not be visible or apparent for those items to be on an inspection.
The points you listed are actually somewhat important. For example, having your kitchen door too close to the bathroom door, the outside door, or a high-traffic customer area, are all just asking for contamination.
@@DarkShard5728 Because both the pointS listed by OP are covered under that same cleanliness issue called "don't shit where you eat, or even in the room next door if you want to pass health inspection."
Where I work in the UK we had an inspector give us 5 stars but just a few weeks later we had maggots dropping out of the espresso machine lol. Had to put an anonymous call out to EHO because we couldn't get permission to stop service 😂
My county changed from a letter grading system to one that goes "Fail", "Needs Improvement", "Good", "Great", "Excellent". I guess they really wanted to convey that a restaurant that gets a C really is fine, but American schools have had so much grade inflation that we're all brain broken about what the letters are supposed to mean.
This In my country our grading system is from 0-20 so there is no ambiguity possible, if you got 10 or above, you passed, under 10 and you know you failed. It's simple and easy to convey. Meanwhile the fact that the American system has now been so broken by affirmative action and whatnot that many people consider a B to be an average grade is mindboggling. Sure artificially inflating the results of the tests to make it seem like you are a great school by hiding the real level of your students and making it feel like you taught them good is a problem in many places (happens here too, when 90% of people graduate highschool and most of which go to college, you might think it's a sign of a good system, but once you go to college and see the level of the people there and how dumbed down a lot of courses get because of that, you realize that it's just that the entire system just swiped the issue under the rug to pretend like they did their job), but since the letter grading system lacks any sense of objective scaling, the scale itself ends up being corrupted by this false perception as well
For me, it’s not as much that as it is that I don’t wanna risk it. Have you ever had a bad stomach virus/food poisoning? Definitely not worth the risk.
Is a c really okay. I see some stuff that will definitely make someone sick eventually since in my area losing 30 points is really high. I always look at the details to see what they got knocked for
What a load of retarded that was. And we don't do a letter grade either. It's a number that has a letter associated with it. Just like in school when you get a letter grade, there's an actual number. You might have gotten an "A", but in the books, there's a 93 or above listed. Same with businesses and health inspections. There's a number, and many states, mine included, actually list the number on the sign with the letter.
I've worked in kitchens and seen the kind of sketchy slime that can pass a health inspection, or simply not be noticed during the inspection. It doesn't matter what system you use to represent the grades (unless it's actually only pass/fail), I still wouldn't eat anyplace that isn't at the top of the score. A system that scores out of 20, and above 10 is a pass? Gross. They missed half the inspection and are still allowed to serve. I'd be looking for scores of 18 as a bare minimum. This is not a place to "try your best and that's good enough", it's food safety which means we are striving for perfection at all times.
I remember the cafe I worked at they could never tell me which cake grabby thing was used was used for each purpose (gluten free, contains nuts etc). It was always just whatever you grabbed first. I was eternally terrified of someone with nut allergies being served with one that had nuts on it
There was a restaurant where I went to college that only ever existed in two states: "So busy they had a line out the door" and "Shut down to fix health code violations". The exact day that they would re-open, they'd be jam-packed again.
I legit told the marketing guy at our company that we should run adds on this video. We build software that helps restarants with food safety processes. Labeling, Temprature sensors, Digital safty checklists. The works.
Having worked in fast food in my youth, then later in life doing a lot more food safety training, I'm happy to realise that the teenage goofballs that I worked with, as well as management actually cared about not making people sick. Apparently this is anomalous? We may have tried deep frying every food item in the place, and held contests to see which of the kitchen staff could eat the biggest burg, but we made sure the food was properly cooked, and clean.
Also large chain restaurant are so worried about Inspections, they will audit themselves. Every month a manager from a different store comes to do a mock inspection.
Half As Kitchen with Amy sounds like fun. Is that a new series/channel coming soon? Maybe to nebula. You realise i am pretty seriously considering joining right, get her on there doing her own show and im in. Done deal.
With concerns to labling its kinda cool. They actually make water solubule lables so theres no need for sticky notes. I'm tempted to get some since it makes meal prep a lot easier.
Would not recommend the water soluble labels. We stopped using them at work because condensation and cooler humidity make the ink in the labels run; they also rub off very easily. We instead use dry erase markers directly on the containers or permanent markers on disposable containers.
Big shout out to Amy (or Aimee/Amie/etc) for being such a great sport in all of these videos! You've made them at least twice as funny since you've started!
As someone who used to work in a kitchen for a hospital and let me tell ya it was a little bit stressful to make sure everything was kept up to cleanliness standards.
Hey! Great vid! Back in the Nineties, I worked as a busboy/dishwasher at a sit-down restaurant in a mall, and here in Ontario, it was top-notch on code. One day while I was filling a tray for the dishwasher, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I immediately took two trays and blocked off the doorway to the cafeteria-style service counter. The cashier said, "Umm, what are you doing?" I quietly told her there was a mouse in the kitchen. Luckily there was a crunchy granola girl on shift who coaxed it into a container and set it free in a grassy field outside.😂
@@mzaite Hey! I was waiting for this, I checked the baseboards for holes (none). But our back door into the concrete infrastructure labyrinth that all malls have was only 10 ft from the trash compactor, and 2 feet beyond that was a door to the outside that, in the early days of banned indoor smoking, was (against code?) propped open. I suspect it toddled in from there. ( 3 summers working there , no droppings, and no more rodents.)
I am on the board of supervisors for an organization that used to have a kitchen (until 2021) where almost none of these rules were followed. The trick? The kitchen had been serving thousands a day since 1946. Gotta love loopholes for existing arrangements that were legal at the time of opening.
I worked as a supervisor at a Supermarket for a while. I feared no corporate overlord or DM that might wander into the store on my shift (even treated the VP like anyone else), but the only visits I truly stressed over were from EcoLab and the County 😅
Speaking from dealing with UK laws, as long as the kitchen isn't lazy, getting 5 (best rating here) is really easy. Have the essentials, seperate sinks, tissue dispensers, pest control. Be diligent in cleaning your kitchen and keeping the food side and paper side organised for your, the customer, and the resturants benefit, the max score will get itself. I've never worked anywhere where it wasn't graded 5/5 at inspection just like the majority of British kitchens (this being said, you can still serve food out of a 0/5 establishment.) California seems to have a few more specific rules.
I have worked in the restaurant industry for 11 years, and this video felt extremely validating. I deal with virtually all of these issues on a daily basis. This was the first HAI video, where I actually knew all the obscure facts. LoL
As someone who worked in a freezer meal prep kitchen where after the pandemic we just started mostly making the meals instead of just making the components so the customers could make it to their standards during "appointments" on the sales floor (more time and material cost effective) a lot of this stuff was... more or less followed? I was told to hand wave proper use of the 3 compartment sink to save on water since we very much did dishes in batches since there wasn't generally enough dish flow to actually justify having me on the clock constantly doing dishes instead of jumping between prep and dishes, so the dish water would have constantly gotten cold
Fun fact about the three-compartment sink: each compartment must be large enough to completely submerge anything you would wash in it. This leads to some very big sinks.
In Spain you don't have a mark. The equivalent to A in New York is what is called "Apto" which basically means aproved. If any restaurant obtains "No apto", is shutdown inmediatly. There are no better kitchens than others, all must be perfect.
This video should be titled "Kitchen Inspections: How the system is SUPPOSED to work." In reality there's a reason every chain restaurant employee who posts a TikTok from their restaurant kitchen gets fired by corporate, and it's because *you don't want to know* what goes on in there. After the videos I've seen from Domino's kitchens I'm never eating at one again.
I have an A-hole BIL who use to work for DP for 10+ years. He was well known for being spiteful and revenge seeking. And had been known to do things with his body fluids to his own family. 2+2 and I have never been in a DP or ate DP pizza and never will.
In every Domino's I've been to (all of them are in Spain) have visible kitchens from the counter. The least sanitary thing I ever saw them do was handing me a cup while having flour all over their hands.
I work in a school kitchen and am ServSafe certified. You should see the pictures the health inspector shows us in our annual food safety retraining. She showed us a few recent restaurant pictures that were so disgusting, we asked what restaurant to avoid. On the bright side, she said that school cafeterias in our district tend to listen to health inspectors and correct their mistakes much more, to the point that she enjoys our inspections. Food safety tends to be much worse where there's high turnover.
One night after an exhausting move to a new town, I took the people who helped me to a local pizza place. I really wish I had looked around BEFORE we placed our orders and handed over money. The floors were just a little greasy, the vents on the soda coolers were dusty, and everything over five feet tall had a 1/4" (or so) layer of dust. I have no idea if the lack of cleanliness extended to the kitchen, as it was behind a wall and there was not even a viewing window into it, but the guy who took orders and handled cash did not wash his hands before making salads at the visible salad station.
I’ve managed to get two A’s at two different NYC cafes when I was in college. I think it’s kind of easy to pass a DOH examination. Whenever I see a restaurant with a B rating I have to really think twice before going in.
i worked as a kitchen lead at chick-fil-a, our corporate food safety walks were so hard to get a 100, that the city walks were an absolute breeze. we had a quarter where we had perfect scores on both food safety inspections, and corporate food quality inspection, i was very proud. the building layout, equipment, and procedures made it really easy to keep up, but it gives me a very different perspective now i’m a server at a different restaurant lol like bro an 88? that would be pretty upsetting to me if it was my kitchen.
I workmat a fast food place! :] I'm FOH, so I don't have to worry about the kitchen stuff- BUT I do, in fact, do morning FOH prep, which is prepping stuff for custard and making teas and stuff. We have a neat lil' machine for the labels...
As someone who has worked in a kitchen I can confirm that health inspections are a pain in the ass. The supervisor really starts to crack down on the little things when it’s around health inspection time.
i worked quite a bit of food service in canada, including places like mcdonalds every single place ive worked at, from low to middleclass establishments, all deserved to be shut down for health and safety violations every single one, but apparently they all passed, so its safe to say that system is bullshit in canada the only time ive ever heard of a place being temporarily shut down was a buffet that had numerous rats in the kitchen
The standards may be set by Health Canada, but every province gets to set its own laws about who enforces what and how. A responsibility that they usually download to the municipality. Anywhere that I've ever worked food service has been cleaner than your home kitchen, and I've seen plenty of Ontario restaurants shut down temporarily and permanently for health violations - often just improper practices or insufficient equipment, not even contamination or infestation.
@@johnladuke6475 perhaps restaurants but not fast food having worked in mcdonalds in ontario, i can certainly say its not the case. ive found mummified burger patties.
The place I worked for was recently opened and we failed our first inspection because we had some wood shelves in the backroom where we stored non-edibles which were not treated.
I worked at a big fair in the snack and fast food joints. They always knew when the inspectors came and told us to clean extra well a day before. but they would pass either way, it was very clean in general.
In Mississippi we have three grades: A (no violations found), B (minor violations found, but corrected during inspection), and C (major violations found). A and B are passing grades; C is failing and will result in temporary closure of the establishment. The local newspaper frequently publishes lists of all area restaurants that have recently received C ratings. I got intensely ill for one day in 2011 after eating takeout from an Asian-style buffet that had a history of health violations and C grades, but took my chances with it because the food was so great there. I was in bed almost the entire day after waking up that morning with diarrhea so bad I was essentially pooping water, followed by a bout of vomiting. While this put me off from coming back for a while, I eventually started going back again until they closed down for good some time around 2021. I wonder if the health department made them close permanently due to continued repeated failed inspections.
Fun fact from California: You have to have a 3 basin sink, but you don't have to use it. It just has to be there, even if you just use the dishwasher. In the mid-Atlantic, every batch of oysters has to have the parasitology certificate with it. Lose the certificate, get in trouble. Serve an oyster that bursts out of someone's chest like 'Alien'? Eh, that's on the producer.
@@kauskedefinitely not for produce. You need a separate sink for washing produce. It's a violation to use the 3 compartment sinks for anything but dishes.
@@codykillian7555Not true; it just has to be emptied out sanitized between dishes, and produce, and can't have one while the other is being done. Depending on your volume of production, the inspector may strongly advise you to have an additional produce sink, but it's not 100% required for the vast majority of food premises. Up until Covid, you didn't even need a separate hand-wash from the dish pit, you were allowed to wash in the rinse sink if the kitchen was small enough. I literally work in industry, and have to go over the health code consistently. The only place that forces tons of stuff that make it hard for small businesses is California, but no one cares what they do.
@@kauske probably the case for other states then. For Idaho this is the rule. I run a BBQ food truck. If I want to cut my own cabbage I have to have a fifth sink in my truck along with a separate hand washing sink. I know Arizona is the same. Cousin can't cut lemons or limes for their drink truck unless they have a fifth produce sink.
@@codykillian7555 That's moronic; it's also double moronic to force a 3 basin sink, when you can use the 2 sink method. Do they also not allow central dish-pits for multi-kitchen facilities there? It's a lot of wasted space to have 3 compartment sinks in every kitchen when you're just going to cart dirties off to the main dish pit anyhow. On the same note, you don't have to have ware-wash on a per-kitchen basis in most places, so as long as you have a mother kitchen for your food truck, you can bin your dirties and wash later. IMO, don't listen to what the inspector says, review the code yourself and challenge them if they try and push things that go beyond it.
If a restaurant has a score of 90, but it just happens so that the 10 points missed come from a combination of violations that make the food extremely unsafe, will the restaurant be able to get away with it until someone directly files a lawsuit for the harm it caused?
In Norway there is no grading as such. A restaurant either passed the inspection with a perfect score or it's closed. A sign by the door displaying the result from the latest inspection is mandatory and instead of a score or grade it has a smiley face.
3:26 dented cans wouldn't be a botulism concern. If C bot got in, that means it's vented to atmosphere. If it's vented to atmosphere, it's aerobic. C bot doesn't produce toxins in aerobic environments so it wouldn't be a health risk. Other forms of spoilage (some pathogenic) can infect a vented can
Dented cans, when dented at the rim is definitely a botulism risk among other pathogens. You seem to forget there are other things in the can besides air. I have opened dented cans of peaches that showed clear signs of botulism because the syrup prevents venting and creates an anaerobic environment. Sometimes things like labels can hide tiny holes in a dented can which causes spoilage in the can. You would not believe the smell.
Ugh I’m the dining director at an assisted living community. One morning as I was coming in the building the health inspector was coming in as well. Cool no big deal. Except the cook I had that morning didn’t take the temp of the walk in and when the inspector went in there, the walk in had gone up overnight and all the food was reading 50 F and we had to throw everything away. It was not a good day.
here in germany the inspections are more based on common sense than on strict guidelines, but on the other hand if you fail in some regard the inspector will tell you what you have to change and come back after a few days and check again.
If I was actually in college for a profesional kitchen studie. And they would tell this, it would be boring, but now I don't need to know this, so its interesting.
Chinese food buffets are notorious for failing inspections for some of the most gross and egregious violations you can think of (e.g. cockroaches in food). Taco Bell, despite being the butt of many jokes, has quite a few locations that have never failed a health inspection.
1:10 If you're wondering why 98 is a bad score in NYC, it's because they (apparently) start at 0 and count up for violations, instead of 100 and counting down.
So a score of 2 is good in NY? In Toronto we do a three-colour system: PASS green meaning good, YELLOW some problems to be fixed but you can remain open, and RED fail shut down immediately or else.
I remember a Kitchen Nightmares episode, where Gordon Ramsay found a pidgeon in the food storage. Now I know that's worth 11 points...
10 points for Gryffindor!
THATS NOT A FAIL! The pidgeon works there, his name is Geoff
Freshest meat
I remember that! I almost threw up...
@@nekomasteryoutube3232Geoff wasn't wearing clothing, and employees working in the nude is generally not permitted.
someone that’s been in the industry for 25 years you should be doing a video on how to pass one because failing one is easy
That's cheating!
There's nothing like watching a newbie sweat their souls out during an inspection they're ment to handle for the first time.
No they’re supposed to know what to do so they don’t fuckin turn my stomach into a shit gatling again.
Passing one is also easy. My former manager somehow always knows when an inspector is coming. We always score a perfect 100 from both the county and a thrid party one hired by corporate.
My manager takes pride in being one of the most profitable locations in the district. His "innovative practices from over 3 decades of experience" include serving customers food that fell on the floor, covering up spoiled food with heavy sauces, and not washing vegetables. We use mystery liquids from the dollar store in our 3 component sink and only bust out the official stuff on inspection days. Same goes for our dissolvable date labels. I often get yelled at for "wasting company time" by insisting I wash my hands after going to the bathroom. Twice a month, the 2 shift supervisors forge temp logs with different colored pens and switch up their handwriting style.
It's true that working in a restaurant makes you never want to eat in one again.
@@ASaltyAccthat comment is making me laugh so hard. Thank you
@@ASaltyAcca scat-ling gun
I worked at a Papa Johns years ago as a manager, one time a manager from another store came back into our prep area with a cockatiel on her shoulder. I told her like 5 times to get it out, she kept insisting it was fine, then it pooped on her shoulder.
bruh
If your store shuts down hers gets more business, brilliant move on her part
haha, drugs
She wanted to get rid of the competition or lower the standards
I had a manager get fired from papa gino's bc he picked up a mouse he found outside while on smoke break and tried to bring it inside. The mouse jumped out of his pocket before he actually got inside
There was this little bowling ally snack bar that served lunches once a week. The place got a C rating, had to shut down for two weeks to get their act together, and when the inspector came back, he gave them a D. How they managed to make things _worse_ I have no idea.
they clearly didn't understand bribery
Maybe the inspector found some stuff that they didn't even notice on the first visit? D:
Since the kitchen was shut down someone thought it would be the perfect place for their pet bird.
I hear lots of people get the D and play with balls in bowling alleys
Probably something that was so caked with filth that it was completely rotted away, but that wasn't visible because of the filth. They scrubbed all the gunk away from the base of the faucet and broke it off because it was rusted through, and then the kitchen didn't have a working sink. Or something equally bad, that just disintegrated when they tried to clean it.
I'd probably watch a Wendover video about the Gulf Oyster incident that led to all those regulations
XD you know theres a story pof lawsuits and maybe deaths....
It was a bacteria/all of the oil spills happening. It was established sometime in the 80s and since then tests have shown that gulf coast oysters are now fine to eat
@@spykillergames8402Great. Sam loves death and talking about it.
Well if it's a California only regulation it probably contains one of those chemicals that only give Californians cancer.
I don't know about the gulf, but oysters are filter feeders, and if they live near the mouths of rivers, and untreated sewage ends up in the river, the oysters can pick up diseases like hepatitis A. It tends to be a problem with cities that have combined waste and storm water sewers, and during heavy rains, can get overwhelmed, and dump excess mixed sewage into rivers untreated.
As for discovering the issue, if people go to the hospital for foodborne illness, it gets tracked, and they might get asked what and where they have eaten recently. If enough mention one food, it will be tested. In the case of shellfish and sewers, they can have preventative restrictions about which areas are allowed, or restrictions after heavy rains.
The soup kitchen my parents ran for 20 years had to get health inspections, and when they took over it never got anything less than a perfect score. Every single time, an absolutely perfect score. One time, there was a single problem (hot stuff going into the fridge before being cooled down), but dad went right down to the store, bought the thing they said to get, and they still gave us the perfect score. People have tried to get them shut down because they don't like poor and homeless people in the area, and restaurants don't like us giving out free food.
Then one day, two months ago, they came in and there was a seagull in the kitchen. The city ordered us shut down. They'd been waiting for years for an excuse, and said we were 'vermin infested'. They refused to re-issue the permit to operate, and when they were closing it down, almost 60 people turned out to cheer as they put up the 'closed' sign for the last time, and yell at them.
20 years of perfect scores, but people thought the filthy subway two blocks away was a cornerstone of the community, despite all the drug deals going on in the parking lot.
So what happens next after that?
@@AsteriskDatBoi Soup kitchen is, as of tomorrow, closed for good. First time it won't have opened in about 70 years. Some police were there to make sure no one was trying to hand out meals to the 'transients', as they call them. The place I live on the oregon coast is a tourist town, and the city wants everything not perfect to be swept under the rug.
@@iainballas well, what is your job and your parents job now? Find any alternatives?
@@AsteriskDatBoi The soup kitchen was volunteer. Cost a lot of money to keep open, some was paid by donations or the church tithe. All the people there came in on days off or took time off work to come in, cook, clean, serve meals, and hand out clothes, blankets and the like to those in need.
@@iainballas The way people and officials react to homeless people is honestly disgusting. They treat homeless and poor people as vermin rather than actual people.
Its honestly heartbreaking to think about all the people who relied on that soup kitchen for food that will now have to find some alternative.....if they can that is.....
People showing up to cheer your place being shut down is just sad....
I remember when I was in high school, we went to a Chinese buffet for a team dinner. The first time I ever saw a "C" score posted in a window. Never going to forget a lineman saying "I'm not going to a restaurant with the same letter as my GPA." We went instead to a local diner.
One thing you left out was the food prep sink. This is completely separate from hand washing and 3 part dish washing sinks. The food prep sink is used exclusively for food prep. There’s no soap in it. Can’t do that because that’s called chemical contamination. In the coolers, food has to be stored a certain way. Raw meats have to be stored on the bottom shelf because they can drip juices. Storing them on higher shelves above vegetables is called cross contamination. Not washing your hands after handling raw meat and then working on vegetables is called cross contamination.
In the UK the local council inspects and scores businesses from 1-5 which has to be displayed on their door and online e.g. uber eats. I havent had food poisoning in over a decade, the system really cleaned things up as many customers refused to shop at places
It's not actually a requirement to display the score. It's just that most places score highly and so want to show it off.
@@adamheller7612It seems the local council pushes it as though it's a strict requirement but nationally in England it's not a legal requirement. Almost all of them display it and you can Google it online in 30seconds
There's a chippy near me that proudly has their 1 in the front window 😂
@@TavershamBeasts
My school got a 2 one time
One important thing that wasn’t mentioned in this video is that restaurants often pay for for 3rd party inspections, usually from NSF. These inspections are far more stringent and thorough than the regular inspection from the Health Department.
I work for a company that not only pays for a 3rd party to do inspections but that also has employees who are paid to do their own audits prior to the 3rd party inspections
paying a 3rd party seems a bother
we just paid the inspector
I'm confused, why would they pay to undergo stricter inspections? Wouldn't they prefer the free inspection that's more likely to give them a high score?
I work for Jolt and we make software for every one of the companies in the chain that is doing these assessments. Fun to see the niche problem we build software for get a video. @@michaelkirschner7471
It's all about practice, If you consistently pass the internal inspections then you are more likely to pass the external assessment@@bread8465
Amy inspecting Half as Kitchen is exactly why I'm subscribed to this channel
the installation of compliant signage is what earns the video a like
This needs to exist
I thought the US food safety system just consisted of Gordon Ramsay throwing containers around and calling you a “panini head” and a “pillock”
No, that's the UK's food safety system.
this is true. i used to work in a bakery and once he came to inspect it. he called me mental and my boss a wanker then he gave us an a- and left
@@wta1518 Nah, just like with his TV shows, Gordon really plays up the drama for the American inspections. His UK inspections are much more level headed and include far fewer (but not 0) insults.
@@adog3129
Did he grab a bread roll, split it into two and place it on your boss's ears and scream "WHAT ARE YOU!?"
I worked for a major fast food chain, and the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed was the health inspector stopping counting when we were 1 point shy of being shut down. He came back 3 days later and gave us the same score.
Honestly I've seen this. I don't think private companies are willing to fail large chains.
@@DominicMV Health departments are general run by the county, not private companies. I was a private consultant that went into hundreds of restaurants... I didn't want them to fail, but I wasn't going to pretend they passed when they didn't. I was in one that got a couple minor marks by the health inspector. While they were writing up their report, I started my assessment - they failed within 30 seconds due to cockroach activity. There was significant cockroach and rodent activity as well as sewage leaking by their paper products... none of this was on the health report.
wendy's
@@RAD6150 Generally but not all. I've been in management at enough restaurants to know that depending on the county, and other factors, the county will sublet the health inspections to private companies. More then once Steritech was the only "health inspector" that came in. And since they were our "Heath Guys" I've seen things that should have been major points just glazed over.
@@DominicMV Where is this? I have never heard of Steritech being subcontracted for government inspections. I have heard of places where health departments don't do their required inspections and Steritech or Ecosure are the only inspections they get... but they are still paid by the restaurant, not the county.
Here in Denmark the health inspector checks a number of areas, and the establishment is rated for the lowest score (1-4) overall. Meaning if you score 1 in one thing and 4 in everything else, you're rated 1. Additionally, if the establishment gets top score 12 months in a row, they get an elite grade.
Also, when the establishment gets a poor result, the *establishment* has to pay the follow-up inspection
If I got a poor result, I would also pay the follow-up inspector.
@@lewis_baseI would always pay em
"You can tell a lot about a restaurant by the state of the toilets. It's a lot easier to keep a toilet clean than it is to keep a kitchen clean, and they let you *see* the toilets."
-- "Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.
I dunno about that, usually drunk patrons don't waltz into the kitchen and diarrhea everywhere _except_ the toilet... Working in foodservice, once every 2 weeks minimum, someone will badly 'miss' the toilet and slink off without telling anyone. Patrons are filthy, disgusting animals sometimes.
@@kauskebut you clean the toilets on a schedule. The kitchen is usually running all the time. That's why it's harder to keep clean.
@@jessebrook1688 Scheduled cleanings don't really help against vandalism, which is what pooping everywhere basically is.
That's why open-kitchen places are great, especially ones where you can watch them prepare your food. You can see the kitchen and not only assess the state of the food-prep area, but also how they handle the food and what precautions to food poisoning they take. If they are fairly lax and lazy, you can assume it's the same for keeping food stored at proper temperatures, cooking to the correct heats and other things.
@@Kaiimei Just because it looks clean doesn't mean much. You can give the illusion of cleanliness without actually being sanitary.
Remember, dangerous foodborne illnesses are virtually undetectable by smell, taste or sight. If the don't use proper sanitizer, or keep good temperature discipline, you won't know until you get very ill.
Fun fact, most fast food companies you regularly eat at also have regular surprise inspections from companies they hire. At Chipotle we had audits from EcoSure, who in my experience were extremely thorough, and then occasional inspections by Chipotle's corporate Safety, Security, and Risk team (SSR), who were even more thorough and also looked at things outside of food safety, like building security, backup systems, cash handling, etc. Most restaurants score far lower on those third party and corporate inspections, and those are the ones the CEOs are looking at because, honestly, if your restaurant is decently run, it should be easy to pass a city health inspection.
100% At Jolt we have entire software products dedicated to helping restaurant operators efficiently go through the food safetly process.
It's hilarious that you included a picture of Tom's Restaurant in NYC at the beginning- it's right by my college campus, and last year there was a whole thing where they got exposed for faking their sanitation rating grade. They had an A grade posted but had actually gotten either a B or C, I don't remember.
As someone who works as a food safety specialist (someone who goes into kitchens and audits them ahead of time to prevent them from failing the health inspection), I appreciate the amount of information packed into your standard format. The only thing that was missing was how to calibrate the food thermometer.
Have to do that myself. And while not difficult, stirring a thermometer around in a cup of ice water without letting it touch the sides is extremely annoying
Also explaining the difference between calibrating and validating. Putting the probe into ice water or boiling water isn't calibrating, it's validating. Changing the set points so that ice water is 32f 0c and boiling is 212f 100c is calibrating. Very few modern thermometers need calibrating since they're digital thermocouples, not analog bimetalic coils.
@Meton2526 Or if it's an alcohol bulb thermometer, you're looking at deriving an error curve from 2 data points, to correct your readings.
*note* this is according to vague memories of organic chem class 20 years ago. Opinion may contain significant errors.
@@CatFish107 That sounds right from my vague memories of chemistry classes, but probably outside the scope of what even a food service manager is going to be exposed to for their food safety licensing.
half the restaurants in nashville (you can look it up online) basically violated every single one at some point. One restaurant that cost $50 a plate we to, we looked it up later, the inspectors said "nobody there could comprehend the fundamentals of food safety" which given how normally dry and careful they are with what inspectors write in reports, means they were INCREDIBLY pissed. Cans of raid were found above the food table next to onions, for example.
Would my home kitchen lose 11 points for having cats in it, 22 because there's two of them, or 0 because cats aren't explicitly listed?
Other animals, and no just 11 points
No points. They're effective rodent control!
This is going to spark a debate, but if you let cats on your counter, you're nasty. "They just go everywhere!" Yeah if you're too lazy to train them
@@sammiemmett9899
in this society, the cats are gonna need a pest control diploma from an accredited training institution to satisfy the gods of bureaucracy.
@@thefrub Right? That kitchen sink has a sprayer hose for a reason! Use it to instill a modicum of control over your feline overlords!!!
Great! Now do one on how so many commercial kitchens remain in business while violating the entire checklist.
Because the schedule the inspector so they know the day they are coming so they clean that day before
@@nicolethompson2399it would be nice if it were that simple. A lot of health inspectors form relationships with restaurants and let them do whatever the fuck they want while the inspector remains willfully ignorant (ie: they don’t look for violations and if they see them they ignore it) it’s not always this way but often is
@@cameron126651I'm intimately aware unfortunately. I just wasn't going to go that deep into it. But yeah tagging along with some health inspectors, I was appalled at what they let slide
Their friends Ben and Andrew help them out when things get tough with the inspectors.
He didnt go into this, but a lot of chains use software to perform self assesments each day to make sure they are good. I work at Jolt a company that builds that software. Really interesting stuff.
This was VERY interesting and having Amy do the similar check at home was eye opening.
Keeping kitchens and pantries at 100% is what I do for a living! You hit most of the big points, but the huge one that gets missed the most often is keeping ice machines clean and sanitized. It's not easy to get all the way up inside some of the larger models.
Yes, along with soda nozzles/bar guns. 6.6.5.
One of my favorite restaurants got shut down temporarily due to failing an inspection. They posted the results of the test in the window and there was not a single item on the list that would've given me pause to eating there. Very few points were deducted on things would consider cleanliness related. It was mostly things about which direction the restroom door swings and where the entrance to the kitchen is.
Things that may be an impediment to timely evacuation during an emergency? There are probably good reasons that may not be visible or apparent for those items to be on an inspection.
The points you listed are actually somewhat important. For example, having your kitchen door too close to the bathroom door, the outside door, or a high-traffic customer area, are all just asking for contamination.
@@johnladuke6475come on you can't say "pointS" and NOT explain why the rotation of the bathroom door is important
@@DarkShard5728 Because both the pointS listed by OP are covered under that same cleanliness issue called "don't shit where you eat, or even in the room next door if you want to pass health inspection."
3:55 What a monstrous way of holding a pen.
Watching this on break at my job at Panera, it's pretty accurate.
But yall also have a private company that comes in to help make sure yall don't fail the inspections.
Where I work in the UK we had an inspector give us 5 stars but just a few weeks later we had maggots dropping out of the espresso machine lol. Had to put an anonymous call out to EHO because we couldn't get permission to stop service 😂
So that was you!?
My county changed from a letter grading system to one that goes "Fail", "Needs Improvement", "Good", "Great", "Excellent". I guess they really wanted to convey that a restaurant that gets a C really is fine, but American schools have had so much grade inflation that we're all brain broken about what the letters are supposed to mean.
This
In my country our grading system is from 0-20 so there is no ambiguity possible, if you got 10 or above, you passed, under 10 and you know you failed. It's simple and easy to convey.
Meanwhile the fact that the American system has now been so broken by affirmative action and whatnot that many people consider a B to be an average grade is mindboggling.
Sure artificially inflating the results of the tests to make it seem like you are a great school by hiding the real level of your students and making it feel like you taught them good is a problem in many places (happens here too, when 90% of people graduate highschool and most of which go to college, you might think it's a sign of a good system, but once you go to college and see the level of the people there and how dumbed down a lot of courses get because of that, you realize that it's just that the entire system just swiped the issue under the rug to pretend like they did their job), but since the letter grading system lacks any sense of objective scaling, the scale itself ends up being corrupted by this false perception as well
For me, it’s not as much that as it is that I don’t wanna risk it. Have you ever had a bad stomach virus/food poisoning?
Definitely not worth the risk.
Is a c really okay. I see some stuff that will definitely make someone sick eventually since in my area losing 30 points is really high. I always look at the details to see what they got knocked for
What a load of retarded that was.
And we don't do a letter grade either. It's a number that has a letter associated with it.
Just like in school when you get a letter grade, there's an actual number. You might have gotten an "A", but in the books, there's a 93 or above listed.
Same with businesses and health inspections. There's a number, and many states, mine included, actually list the number on the sign with the letter.
I've worked in kitchens and seen the kind of sketchy slime that can pass a health inspection, or simply not be noticed during the inspection. It doesn't matter what system you use to represent the grades (unless it's actually only pass/fail), I still wouldn't eat anyplace that isn't at the top of the score. A system that scores out of 20, and above 10 is a pass? Gross. They missed half the inspection and are still allowed to serve. I'd be looking for scores of 18 as a bare minimum. This is not a place to "try your best and that's good enough", it's food safety which means we are striving for perfection at all times.
Amy is becoming a celebrity in her own right. If Sam ever gives her some time off, she needs to be on Jet lag.
She had a guest role on this season of Jet Lag! She recorded trivia questions!
@@juliegolick I was about to ask if she actually existed or was simply an HAI character 😄
She has a great voice too. Would be a great host if Sam ever gets stuck in Antarctica for 6 months while filming Jet Lag of whatever.
She could start a restaurant. Call it "Amy's Kitchen"
@@cloudkitt I'm still half-convinced she's Ben in disguise.
I remember the cafe I worked at they could never tell me which cake grabby thing was used was used for each purpose (gluten free, contains nuts etc). It was always just whatever you grabbed first. I was eternally terrified of someone with nut allergies being served with one that had nuts on it
That's a valid concern!
Maybe they should’ve at least posted a sign informing patrons with nut allergies they couldn’t guarantee there’d be no cross contamination?
Amy is the MVP of on-site reporting.
She can be the outside correspondent or the inside-her-own-kitchen correspondent.
There was a restaurant where I went to college that only ever existed in two states: "So busy they had a line out the door" and "Shut down to fix health code violations". The exact day that they would re-open, they'd be jam-packed again.
How was the video about food safety health inspection not sponsernd by a meal kit delivery service? The segways write themselves
The Segways Ride themselves, you mean! (btw, segue is the word I think you're looking for; Segways are those stand up scooters haha)
I legit told the marketing guy at our company that we should run adds on this video. We build software that helps restarants with food safety processes. Labeling, Temprature sensors, Digital safty checklists. The works.
Having worked in fast food in my youth, then later in life doing a lot more food safety training, I'm happy to realise that the teenage goofballs that I worked with, as well as management actually cared about not making people sick. Apparently this is anomalous? We may have tried deep frying every food item in the place, and held contests to see which of the kitchen staff could eat the biggest burg, but we made sure the food was properly cooked, and clean.
Also large chain restaurant are so worried about Inspections, they will audit themselves. Every month a manager from a different store comes to do a mock inspection.
Half As Kitchen with Amy sounds like fun. Is that a new series/channel coming soon? Maybe to nebula. You realise i am pretty seriously considering joining right, get her on there doing her own show and im in. Done deal.
Thank you for the tutorial! The inspector is in for one hell of a ride
With concerns to labling its kinda cool. They actually make water solubule lables so theres no need for sticky notes. I'm tempted to get some since it makes meal prep a lot easier.
Would not recommend the water soluble labels. We stopped using them at work because condensation and cooler humidity make the ink in the labels run; they also rub off very easily. We instead use dry erase markers directly on the containers or permanent markers on disposable containers.
Perfect! Exactly the information I needed. Off to fail my restaurant inspection now!
Love the Amy one site segments!
Big shout out to Amy (or Aimee/Amie/etc) for being such a great sport in all of these videos! You've made them at least twice as funny since you've started!
These alternate spellings make me cry 😢
Its Amy, you can see her name on the form where it says "Half as Kitchen"
It's Amy. It's in the description.
It's "Hey_me", the H is silent
if you name your child aimee you do not deserve children
If i ever open a resturant im just gonna go ham with a flamethrower when the health inspector comes. Take that, germs!
that went into a different direction real fast
then when the fire inspector comes you wash everything
Yeah, you do that and you'll get points off for carbon buildup and visible dirt, aka ashes.
As someone who used to work in a kitchen for a hospital and let me tell ya it was a little bit stressful to make sure everything was kept up to cleanliness standards.
Hey! Great vid! Back in the Nineties, I worked as a busboy/dishwasher at a sit-down restaurant in a mall, and here in Ontario, it was top-notch on code. One day while I was filling a tray for the dishwasher, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I immediately took two trays and blocked off the doorway to the cafeteria-style service counter. The cashier said, "Umm, what are you doing?" I quietly told her there was a mouse in the kitchen. Luckily there was a crunchy granola girl on shift who coaxed it into a container and set it free in a grassy field outside.😂
If you see one, there's usually more.
@@mzaite Hey! I was waiting for this, I checked the baseboards for holes (none). But our back door into the concrete infrastructure labyrinth that all malls have was only 10 ft from the trash compactor, and 2 feet beyond that was a door to the outside that, in the early days of banned indoor smoking, was (against code?) propped open. I suspect it toddled in from there. ( 3 summers working there , no droppings, and no more rodents.)
We need an interview with Amy
And she needs to blink in morse code to indicate if she is being held hostage.
@@philsharp758 I have been saying it all along. We need a welfare check on Amy.
I am on the board of supervisors for an organization that used to have a kitchen (until 2021) where almost none of these rules were followed. The trick? The kitchen had been serving thousands a day since 1946. Gotta love loopholes for existing arrangements that were legal at the time of opening.
Why do you sound proud to have contributed to unsanitary conditions?
Epic, just patiently waiting for our video all about gulf oyster regulations 🙂
"If the health inspectors are fully staffed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...
Thanks for the how-to video! Will keep this in mind
I worked as a supervisor at a Supermarket for a while. I feared no corporate overlord or DM that might wander into the store on my shift (even treated the VP like anyone else), but the only visits I truly stressed over were from EcoLab and the County 😅
Thanks for the tutorial, I definitely won’t be passing my next kitchen inspection!
I liked the part when you said the faucet needs to reach all three sinks, and then showed a faucet that only reaches the middle sink 😂
The real ones tend to be shaped like that, but have a long flexible hose on them.
@@johnladuke6475 yup I used to work in food service, I do not miss those hoses that got dishwasher everywhere!
i relate to Amy's shaky hand soo much
Speaking from dealing with UK laws, as long as the kitchen isn't lazy, getting 5 (best rating here) is really easy. Have the essentials, seperate sinks, tissue dispensers, pest control. Be diligent in cleaning your kitchen and keeping the food side and paper side organised for your, the customer, and the resturants benefit, the max score will get itself. I've never worked anywhere where it wasn't graded 5/5 at inspection just like the majority of British kitchens (this being said, you can still serve food out of a 0/5 establishment.)
California seems to have a few more specific rules.
I need someone to do a compilation of all the weird things amy has done in the name of hai
I have worked in the restaurant industry for 11 years, and this video felt extremely validating. I deal with virtually all of these issues on a daily basis. This was the first HAI video, where I actually knew all the obscure facts. LoL
As someone who worked in a freezer meal prep kitchen where after the pandemic we just started mostly making the meals instead of just making the components so the customers could make it to their standards during "appointments" on the sales floor (more time and material cost effective) a lot of this stuff was... more or less followed? I was told to hand wave proper use of the 3 compartment sink to save on water since we very much did dishes in batches since there wasn't generally enough dish flow to actually justify having me on the clock constantly doing dishes instead of jumping between prep and dishes, so the dish water would have constantly gotten cold
Fun fact about the three-compartment sink: each compartment must be large enough to completely submerge anything you would wash in it. This leads to some very big sinks.
Don't forget about contact time in the sanitizer! 😂
Am I the only one that kind of wanted to spend more time on the details of violations in Amy's kitchen? 😅
Amy doesn't want to talk about it.
Is there content on violation for health safety? Are we talking about the one Gordon visited in his show or?
In Spain you don't have a mark. The equivalent to A in New York is what is called "Apto" which basically means aproved. If any restaurant obtains "No apto", is shutdown inmediatly. There are no better kitchens than others, all must be perfect.
This video should be titled "Kitchen Inspections: How the system is SUPPOSED to work." In reality there's a reason every chain restaurant employee who posts a TikTok from their restaurant kitchen gets fired by corporate, and it's because *you don't want to know* what goes on in there. After the videos I've seen from Domino's kitchens I'm never eating at one again.
I have an A-hole BIL who use to work for DP for 10+ years. He was well known for being spiteful and revenge seeking. And had been known to do things with his body fluids to his own family. 2+2 and I have never been in a DP or ate DP pizza and never will.
On the other hand I've had various friends work in UK McDonald's in various cities and they say the places were clean and the food was safe.
In every Domino's I've been to (all of them are in Spain) have visible kitchens from the counter. The least sanitary thing I ever saw them do was handing me a cup while having flour all over their hands.
I work in a school kitchen and am ServSafe certified. You should see the pictures the health inspector shows us in our annual food safety retraining. She showed us a few recent restaurant pictures that were so disgusting, we asked what restaurant to avoid. On the bright side, she said that school cafeterias in our district tend to listen to health inspectors and correct their mistakes much more, to the point that she enjoys our inspections. Food safety tends to be much worse where there's high turnover.
One night after an exhausting move to a new town, I took the people who helped me to a local pizza place.
I really wish I had looked around BEFORE we placed our orders and handed over money.
The floors were just a little greasy, the vents on the soda coolers were dusty, and everything over five feet tall had a 1/4" (or so) layer of dust.
I have no idea if the lack of cleanliness extended to the kitchen, as it was behind a wall and there was not even a viewing window into it, but the guy who took orders and handled cash did not wash his hands before making salads at the visible salad station.
I’ve managed to get two A’s at two different NYC cafes when I was in college. I think it’s kind of easy to pass a DOH examination. Whenever I see a restaurant with a B rating I have to really think twice before going in.
i worked as a kitchen lead at chick-fil-a, our corporate food safety walks were so hard to get a 100, that the city walks were an absolute breeze.
we had a quarter where we had perfect scores on both food safety inspections, and corporate food quality inspection, i was very proud. the building layout, equipment, and procedures made it really easy to keep up, but it gives me a very different perspective now i’m a server at a different restaurant lol like bro an 88? that would be pretty upsetting to me if it was my kitchen.
Can't wait to eat at half as kitchen!
Nice map of the US annexing british Columbia at 00:29, hope to see you at bad as interesting next year
lol, it's probably a different projection
I workmat a fast food place! :] I'm FOH, so I don't have to worry about the kitchen stuff- BUT I do, in fact, do morning FOH prep, which is prepping stuff for custard and making teas and stuff. We have a neat lil' machine for the labels...
5:39 Greatest use of a silly stock photo ever
As someone who has worked in a kitchen I can confirm that health inspections are a pain in the ass. The supervisor really starts to crack down on the little things when it’s around health inspection time.
i worked quite a bit of food service in canada, including places like mcdonalds
every single place ive worked at, from low to middleclass establishments, all deserved to be shut down for health and safety violations
every single one, but apparently they all passed, so its safe to say that system is bullshit in canada
the only time ive ever heard of a place being temporarily shut down was a buffet that had numerous rats in the kitchen
The food can't be that bad if the rats not only survive, but also procreate.
The standards may be set by Health Canada, but every province gets to set its own laws about who enforces what and how. A responsibility that they usually download to the municipality. Anywhere that I've ever worked food service has been cleaner than your home kitchen, and I've seen plenty of Ontario restaurants shut down temporarily and permanently for health violations - often just improper practices or insufficient equipment, not even contamination or infestation.
@@johnladuke6475 perhaps restaurants
but not fast food
having worked in mcdonalds in ontario, i can certainly say its not the case.
ive found mummified burger patties.
This video was to me definitely one of the MOST interesting half as interestings! the Gulf Oyster poster regulations were hilarious
The place I worked for was recently opened and we failed our first inspection because we had some wood shelves in the backroom where we stored non-edibles which were not treated.
I worked at a big fair in the snack and fast food joints. They always knew when the inspectors came and told us to clean extra well a day before. but they would pass either way, it was very clean in general.
In Mississippi we have three grades: A (no violations found), B (minor violations found, but corrected during inspection), and C (major violations found). A and B are passing grades; C is failing and will result in temporary closure of the establishment. The local newspaper frequently publishes lists of all area restaurants that have recently received C ratings.
I got intensely ill for one day in 2011 after eating takeout from an Asian-style buffet that had a history of health violations and C grades, but took my chances with it because the food was so great there. I was in bed almost the entire day after waking up that morning with diarrhea so bad I was essentially pooping water, followed by a bout of vomiting. While this put me off from coming back for a while, I eventually started going back again until they closed down for good some time around 2021. I wonder if the health department made them close permanently due to continued repeated failed inspections.
5:46 nothing more inspiring than doomscrolling while cooking rice
5:54 I find it funny that he says "mastering" while using stock footage with an error in it.
Nice, love the channel, keep up the great work guys ❤
Thank you!!! Now I know how to fail a kitchen inspection
Can't wait to try it!
As someone who has never stepped foot into the kitchen part of a restaurant, this was very helpful
It's time for my favourite show, Get Amy to do Random Stuff. She's the real mvp
I try to do as many of these things as possible when my friends come over to eat. It's our food version of Russian Roulette 😋
I have had dozens of restaurants and know of hundreds of restaurants from friends that nobody has ever shut down
I remember at my old place they lightly hit us for having the utensils facing the wrong direction. So ya they're pretty thorough
0:59 that’s Tom’s Restaurant, the one they used for Monk’s Cafe in Seinfeld!
Fun fact from California: You have to have a 3 basin sink, but you don't have to use it. It just has to be there, even if you just use the dishwasher. In the mid-Atlantic, every batch of oysters has to have the parasitology certificate with it. Lose the certificate, get in trouble. Serve an oyster that bursts out of someone's chest like 'Alien'? Eh, that's on the producer.
The 3 basin is in case the machine breaks; and also for large objects and washing produce.
@@kauskedefinitely not for produce. You need a separate sink for washing produce. It's a violation to use the 3 compartment sinks for anything but dishes.
@@codykillian7555Not true; it just has to be emptied out sanitized between dishes, and produce, and can't have one while the other is being done.
Depending on your volume of production, the inspector may strongly advise you to have an additional produce sink, but it's not 100% required for the vast majority of food premises.
Up until Covid, you didn't even need a separate hand-wash from the dish pit, you were allowed to wash in the rinse sink if the kitchen was small enough.
I literally work in industry, and have to go over the health code consistently. The only place that forces tons of stuff that make it hard for small businesses is California, but no one cares what they do.
@@kauske probably the case for other states then. For Idaho this is the rule. I run a BBQ food truck. If I want to cut my own cabbage I have to have a fifth sink in my truck along with a separate hand washing sink.
I know Arizona is the same. Cousin can't cut lemons or limes for their drink truck unless they have a fifth produce sink.
@@codykillian7555 That's moronic; it's also double moronic to force a 3 basin sink, when you can use the 2 sink method.
Do they also not allow central dish-pits for multi-kitchen facilities there? It's a lot of wasted space to have 3 compartment sinks in every kitchen when you're just going to cart dirties off to the main dish pit anyhow.
On the same note, you don't have to have ware-wash on a per-kitchen basis in most places, so as long as you have a mother kitchen for your food truck, you can bin your dirties and wash later.
IMO, don't listen to what the inspector says, review the code yourself and challenge them if they try and push things that go beyond it.
If a restaurant has a score of 90, but it just happens so that the 10 points missed come from a combination of violations that make the food extremely unsafe, will the restaurant be able to get away with it until someone directly files a lawsuit for the harm it caused?
89, but it's inside a literal birdcage
4:49 lmbo, not the tortillas KEKWFacepalm
(Also I loved the animations in that bit SuperVinlin )
My dad had this job before passing away last year 😢
He was very proud of his duty and left no prisoners.
So sorry for your loss.
In Norway there is no grading as such. A restaurant either passed the inspection with a perfect score or it's closed. A sign by the door displaying the result from the latest inspection is mandatory and instead of a score or grade it has a smiley face.
3:26 dented cans wouldn't be a botulism concern. If C bot got in, that means it's vented to atmosphere. If it's vented to atmosphere, it's aerobic. C bot doesn't produce toxins in aerobic environments so it wouldn't be a health risk. Other forms of spoilage (some pathogenic) can infect a vented can
Dented cans, when dented at the rim is definitely a botulism risk among other pathogens. You seem to forget there are other things in the can besides air. I have opened dented cans of peaches that showed clear signs of botulism because the syrup prevents venting and creates an anaerobic environment. Sometimes things like labels can hide tiny holes in a dented can which causes spoilage in the can. You would not believe the smell.
Ugh I’m the dining director at an assisted living community. One morning as I was coming in the building the health inspector was coming in as well. Cool no big deal. Except the cook I had that morning didn’t take the temp of the walk in and when the inspector went in there, the walk in had gone up overnight and all the food was reading 50 F and we had to throw everything away. It was not a good day.
A - acceptable, B - bad, C - contagious, D - deadly, F - foreclosure
Yes! Thank you for the food and beverage video 🥂🍽️🍷
here in germany the inspections are more based on common sense than on strict guidelines, but on the other hand if you fail in some regard the inspector will tell you what you have to change and come back after a few days and check again.
as long as i don't watch the cheesy stock footage, this channel is pretty good.
If I was actually in college for a profesional kitchen studie. And they would tell this, it would be boring, but now I don't need to know this, so its interesting.
can confirm, the sinks are very complicated in restaurants
Chinese food buffets are notorious for failing inspections for some of the most gross and egregious violations you can think of (e.g. cockroaches in food). Taco Bell, despite being the butt of many jokes, has quite a few locations that have never failed a health inspection.
I love how the US map claims a massive chunk of Canada at the beginning