New Health Chief Open To Restaurant Grading

Kennedy (pictured at left), who began work this week as New Haven’s new $145,000-a-year public health director, made the remark Wednesday in response to a question at a City Hall press conference at which Mayor Toni Harp introduced him to the public.

Kennedy has lived in New Haven before. ​“He earned three … three … three advanced degrees from Yale,” Harp noted. (For the record, he earned an MD, a PhD, and a masters in public health.) He has most recently served as interim health director of Monroe County, N.Y. He has already moved into a downtown New Haven apartment.

In his new job, Kennedy will oversee one of Mayor Harp’s stated policy priorities: Public health (including this pending proposal to ban outdoor smoking on school and park property). The health department works on, among other issues, infant and child health, AIDS prevention, emergency preparedness — and inspecting restaurants.

Both in New York and in California, where Kennedy worked previously, the state requires restaurants to display the results of health inspections. It leaves it up to local jurisdictions to design the details. In some places, restaurants post letter grades in their windows. In other cases, they display numerical scores, or colors (“green for good,” he said, ​“red for stop”).

Connecticut has no such rules; the results of inspections themselves are public information, though the public rarely sees them.

Kennedy declared himself prepared ​“to explore if it makes sense in this community,” he said. Click on the video to watch his complete answer.

He sees ​“value” in a grading system that gives customers ​“a sense of what they’re walking into” when they enter a restaurant.” On the other hand, inspectors might find it ​“challenging” to establish needed ​“good working relationships with the industry” when ​“you’re coming to grade them.”

To his surprise, he said, in the past, restaurant owners and managers in Rochester, N.Y. told him they’d welcome a grading system.

“We do a lot of work to provide a safe and healthy environment. We want that to be known,” they said.

Restauranteurs Respond

“I would happily support the idea of posting grades on the door,” said Dominick Splendorio, owner of Zafra on Orange Street, if the grades simply reflected his kitchen’s cleanliness and organization. But health inspections here offer a skewed view, he argued.

“I’ve gotten points off scores because my bathroom water temperature is too hot,” he said. ​“I’ve gotten points off because my kitchen guy is drinking water from an open container.”

A customer would interpret a lower grade as meaning he had an unclean kitchen, not because a rest room had a broken tile, he said.

Matt Kish, who manages Meat & Co. on Crown Street, cited the same reason for opposing the idea of publicly displaying results. ​“I don’t think it is really a true representation of the condition of the restaurant,” he said.

Over at Wings Over New Haven, Terrell Burress welcomed the idea.

“It helps the customer,” he said. ​“I believe it gives the customer a point of view about the restaurant before they try it.”

Paul Kowalski (pictured), who oversees health inspections in New Haven, said state law requires cities to perform the inspections as they do, with a uniform numerical checklist. As a result, a score produces a ​“snapshot in time” about a restaurant rather than a picture of whether it’s, say, generally a pristine or dirty place. Kowalski, who filled in as interim health department director for a year and a half until Kennedy arrived this week, said he therefore hasn’t seen a need to seek public postings.

“Anyone can walk into a restaurant now and ask,” he said.

Markeshia Ricks contributed reporting.