Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 170, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1916 — New York Eating Places Inspected and Tagged [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

New York Eating Places Inspected and Tagged

IkißW YORK— Probably never before have the restaurant proprietors of New IN York city experienced such a shock as they have undergone recently. For they have been told that whether they wished it or not their eating places

were going to be carefully examined by health department Inspectors and furnished with cards indicating their condition from a sanitary point of view. . For the first time the man who patronizes them will have, as soon as the department has completed its present work, a chance to know what Is going on behind the screen which separates the kitchen from the dining room, and whether shining sliver and

spotless linen in front Is matched by , equally shining stewpans and clean dishtowels in the rear. To find this out, all a man will have to do Is to step up to the proprietor and ask for the health department inspection card. The proprietor, of course, is not obliged to show It, but if the ideas of Lucius P. Brown, director of the bureau of food and drugs, who is responsible for the grading, are correct, it will be only the proprietor who has reason to be ashamed of his card w’ho will decline to show it. A glance at this card will show the customer in detail what the conditions in the restaurant are, and whether, taken altogether, they mean that the restaurant is “good, 0 “fair” or “bad.” In the early inspections, about 4 per cent of the eating places were graded as “good” or “fair” and the rest as “bad. But in many Instances the unapproved condition which led to the low grading was the result of lack of knowledge or oversight rather than of deliberate uncleanliness, so that Mr. Brown is confident that before long a large proportion of the restaurants will have been regarded as “fair” and a great many as “good.”