Illustration: Kate Dehler
New York City’s Department of Health has health problems of its own: There aren’t enough restaurant inspectors and it’s stressing out some owners. Just ask Sal, who opened an outer borough pizzeria 18 months ago and is still waiting on his initial inspection. “We’re coming up on two years,” says Sal (who asked us not to use his real name to avoid drawing the potential ire of the city). “Any time that I step away from the restaurant for more than, like, a couple of days, it’s like, Are they gonna come?”
Sal isn’t alone. One restaurateur tells me that it took a year and a half for an inspector to show up at his downtown business. Others have resigned themselves to something like a Health Inspection Purgatory. One person said he was told to wait, then wait some more: “Sometimes you’re in this very stressful limbo for the better part of a year or two.”
Longer-tenured operators say their re-visits are also lagging behind. Red Hook Lobster Pound was due for a check-in this past March. The city showed up four months late. Owner Susan Povich says that her usual experience with the department is “really positive” but that individual inspectors still have the power to determine a restaurant’s fate. These new developments create extra anxiety around an already-stressful process.
By the DOH’s own admission, fewer inspections are being conducted by fewer inspectors: Just over 66 percent of the city’s estimated 27,000 food establishments were inspected between July of 2023 and this past June. It’s a drop from the 83 percent that were inspected the year before, and far short of the DOH’s stated goal of 100 percent. Officially, the DOH cites “staffing shortages.” But it’s more like a staffing crisis: The agency employs 167 “public health sanitarians” (a.k.a. inspectors), a 20-percent drop from the staffing numbers before COVID. That’s one inspector for every 161 restaurants. (The department is also losing its commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who recently announced he will step down.)
It’s insane,” says Vincent Barile, a consultant who helps restaurateurs prepare for and pass inspections. Pre-pandemic, restaurants that received an “A” grade during their inspections could expect the city to return 11 to 13 months later. (Those that got “B” grades expected follow-up inspections three to five months later, and “C” grades were revisited within three to five months.) Now, the timeline has shifted. ”Before, I could predict when they would happen,” Barile says. “I can’t predict now. I have no idea.”
The DOH has been struggling to get back to full strength since the pandemic closed restaurants and effectively halted inspections for most of 2020, during which time the city’s workforce saw “an exodus” of staffers. “You’ve got to imagine that it was a complete reset,” Barile says. “It took two years, two-and-a-half years for things to come back, so that’s every single restaurant — new, old, whatever — due for an inspection. They’re never catching up.”
In the absence of any clear guidance from the city, gossip takes hold: “You should mention that they are also hiring people from staffing agencies,” one downtown owner suggests. “I can’t disclose where I heard this from, sorry.”
Tenured industry workers also say the new inspectors, when they do come in, can seem a bit green. “The overall feeling, I would say, is that they’re slightly more lenient than they used to be — probably because they’re spread more thin,” says one. “I’ve seen them sort of sit at a table, and sit on their Instagram, or talk to someone. They’re supposed to be writing a report, they’re taking a table, and they’re just sitting there killing time.”
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