Every few months, a Chinese employee will send an alarming e-mail to the thousands of Chinese employees at Microsoft, saying “I got sick at restaurant ‘X’, and they had 4 critical red health violations at their last inspection, so STAY AWAY!” These people usually mean well, but tend to shout “fire” without looking line-by-line at the health inspection reports for all of the other restaurants they visit.

Here is some news for my readers: nearly every good asian restaurant in the Seattle area that I review and recommend gets multiple critical red violations in health inspections! You can look up health violations here, and even subscribe to get notified of health-related shutdowns here.

Before reacting too quickly to the score on a health inspection, you should look at the report and make your own judgment. A “temperature violation” at a Sichuan restauarant that scores 85 (100 is the worst) is different from “toxic materials” at a German restaurant that scores a 40. The whole point of Sichuan food is that it’s spicy and kills the bacteria. It’s really absurd to think of a single restaurant in Sichuan that keeps its food at 39 degrees all the time. As another example, take a “temperature violation” at a Korean place that serves Kimchee and spicy Tofu. Kimchee is just spoiled vegatables, and requires lots of bacteria to make. It is not even possible to make Kimchee at the “safe” temperatures of the health inspectors.

And if you get sick at a restaurant and they scored a 75 two months ago, the score is probably not related to your getting sick. A 75 two months ago could be a good explanation why you got sick two months ago, but odds are that the restauarant is one of the cleanest in town for the next couple of months after that score. If you’re going to worry about a high score, worry about the restaurant that’s going to get the high score next week, not the one that got it two months ago.

Finally, if you hear someone smearing your favorite authentic asian place in Seattle, take it with a big grain of salt, do your own research, and check again in a couple of months. Many of these people in the restaurant business here have rivalries and histories that resemble a soap opera. Every month someone is leaving one to go to the other for some really dramatic reason, and rumors swirl about love affairs, shady dealings, financial ruin, and anything else that might get people to stop going to one restaurant or the other. As long as the restaurant hasn’t been shut down, you shouldn’t care who the proprieter’s bitter ex-wife is scheming with, nor whether they got a couple of “temperature violations”.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under restaurant reviews, Life at Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.