Anchorage Daily News

A customer claimed to see a cockroach crawl out of a pan of food at a popular local buffet in August. It was the fourth roach complaint in five months at the eatery.

Once again, the city sent a health inspector to check it out.

The inspector wrote up the restaurant for dirty walls and floors. She reported rodent droppings, mold behind the dishwashing area and small live roaches in a storage area.

"The floor is being used as a place to prepare food," the inspector wrote. She snapped a photo of a plastic bag full of raw chicken drumsticks sitting on the wet tile floor, waiting to be moved to a colander.

"This is not allowed."

This is why we have health inspections.

Every year, each of the city's six health inspectors makes hundreds of these visits to Anchorage restaurants, cafeterias and coffee stands.

They're looking for things that could make you sick. Because by the time you get your salad or sandwich, it's too late to know if the cook came to work with norovirus or washed his hands after hitting the bathroom.

"The public cannot see that the food is contaminated. It looks just like any other food," said Dr. Beth Funk, a medical epidemiologist with the state public health division.

Most Anchorage restaurants -- most of the time -- do well during the city's surprise visits.

The average score for regular inspections in 2007 was 95 out of 100 points.

But a few reports will freeze your fork in midair, and it's not always easy to guess which eateries will ace their inspections and which need work on any given day.

Here's how to find out what inspectors see behind the kitchen doors of your favorite restaurant, and why it matters.

OPENING CREDITS

Since this is a story about food and restaurants and inspections, let's start by meeting a few kitchen cops:

Chris Tofteberg. "Star Wars" fan. Amateur filmmaker. Head of the city food safety program for the past nine years. "I always say that if I don't feel safe going out to eat, then I'm not doing my job," he says.

Jason Froehle. At 35, Froehle is a former college hockey player and a veteran among the city's young crew of inspectors. It's his job to make sure everyone's consistent, applying the same rules when scoring the hundreds of restaurants scattered across town.

Michelle Soper. Another city inspector, Soper covers Midtown. To communicate with restaurant owners who don't speak English, she came up with a new booklet that translates phrases like "Hello, I am a health inspector," "This must be thrown away" and "I cannot accept any money" in three languages.

Julia Fawcett. A food microbiologist, Fawcett works for the School District rather than the city Health Department. She drops in on local cafeterias to prepare them for inspections and is a cautious diner. One of the first things she looks at in a restaurant: How clean is the restroom?

SURPRISE!

L Street and Eighth Avenue. The city Health Department office on a winter morning.

Froehle warms his car in the frozen parking lot, glass squealing as he scrapes ice from the windows, and talks about his plans for the day. He'll inspect a coffee stand and a taco spot, test the chemicals in a public swimming pool and stop by a food warehouse.

None of these businesses knows he's coming.

Froehle arrived at a new Taco Del Mar on East 88th Avenue. He introduced himself, scrubbed his hands and sank a long metal thermometer into steaming pans of taco fixings. A big part of a health inspector's job is making sure food stays hot or cold enough to kill anything that could make you sick.

The city received more than 70 food-borne-illness complaints last year, and health officials say many cases of food poisoning go unreported.

As Froehle worked, an employee folded burritos nearby -- "Is this going to be for here or to go?" she asked. "Venus" by Bananarama played over the speakers.

Several songs later, Froehle was finished.

Many visits take less than an hour, which is good, because each inspector is responsible for checking nearly 400 places a year. They have degrees in subjects like biology and chemistry, and can earn $18.67 to $29.04 an hour.

"Temps are awesome ... just about everybody's doing a real good job of washing their hands," Froehle told the manager.

The final score: 95 points.

THE RULES

When it comes to food-safety rules, the things most likely to gross you out -- crusty drinking glasses or a hair in the omelet -- aren't necessarily what makes you sick.

"That kind of turns you off, but somebody not washing their hands after using the restroom is far more severe than the hair in the pizza," said Fawcett, a food microbiologist and food safety watchdog for the School District.

She also teaches an eight-hour food safety certification class to restaurant workers and managers.

Employees from eateries and bars around Anchorage -- Snow City, International House of Pancakes, The Whaler -- gathered for one of these classes, taught by another instructor, in mid-December. Each student studied from a thick, glossy schoolbook.

Pictures of food you should reject from your supplier, such as a gray, dry fish and a sticky, purplish chicken, filled one chapter. Another page showed the right way and the wrong way to serve muffins. (Hint: Use tongs, not fingers.)

Some of the bigger violations in the rule book include:

• Food temperature. Letting food that's waiting to be served approach room temperature can grow microorganisms that cause illnesses such as salmonellosis. Restaurants must keep food like cooked turkey or ham below 45 degrees or above 140 degrees.

• Bad employee hygiene. Are workers smoking in the kitchen? Are they wiping their nose and then touching food, or handling raw meat and then making sandwiches without washing their hands?

• Food from unapproved sources. In other words, it's not OK for a restaurant to sell chowder that the owner made at home, or moose meat donated by a friend.

• Pests. Eateries have to be on guard for rodents looking for easy food and shelter from the cold. And while freezing winters make Alaska a tough place for bugs, that doesn't mean inspectors don't see signs of insects such as roaches and fruit flies at some restaurants.

THE SCORES

Plastic flowers divide the booths at American Diner, an old-school cheap-eats cafe in a strip mall at the corner of Arctic Boulevard and International Airport Road. The coffee is weak today.

The only sounds are the clink of dishes in the kitchen, the hum of a fan and a man with his T-shirt tucked in his jeans turning newspaper pages over his omelet. "Joey, this is way too greasy, she wants another one," someone says to the cook.

The 100-point scoring system health inspectors use to rate restaurants will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken a pop quiz in school.

Each health violation knocks one to five points off the final score. The more serious the rule, the more points the restaurant loses.

The city is thinking of rewriting its food code to do away with this point system, Tofteberg said.

"It's very popular with the public, it's easy to understand," he said, "but sometimes it can be deceptive."

Two restaurants might both score 95, for example, but one could have a sewage leak and the other might have a cluster of relatively minor problems like uncovered light fixtures.

Poor inspection reports can lead to closures, embarrassment and lost sales.

On Arctic Boulevard, American Diner is trying to reverse a series of low scores, said executive chef Joey Dineros.

The city briefly closed this eatery in late 2006 -- partly because it was operating without a valid permit while changing owners -- and gave the diner a barely passing score of 72 during an August inspection.

During that visit the inspector said he saw a cook smoke in the kitchen, put his cigarette out in dishwater, then chop onions without first washing his hands.

An inspection in January wasn't any better. The restaurant still had many of the same problems, such as the need for more employees to get food-safety training and to make repairs around the restaurant.

Dineros set out to reclaim the restaurant's reputation by hiring new employees, repairing problem areas like old floor tiles and better labeling food to ensure it's fresh, he said.

The restaurant scored an 88 during the Health Department's latest visit, a re- inspection, in February.

"I want to keep it up," Dineros said.

THE CLOSURES

A widescreen TV plays one of the "Spider-Man" flicks on one wall. Awards for favorite local restaurant paper another. This is the proud Panda Restaurant at Northern Lights Boulevard and Gambell Street.

A customer leaves with a warm box of takeout, past the tank of koi that gurgles next to the door. Three different employees say goodbye.

It's rare for the city to close a restaurant. It happened 22 times in 2007, and most customers don't notice -- usually the businesses fix the problem within hours in order to reopen.

The closures might result from an unexpected problem like a broken water pipe, or from big health code violations that could make someone ill.

"We use it sparingly, only when there's an imminent health hazard," Tofteberg said of temporarily closing restaurants.

On Aug. 1, for example, the Health Department closed Panda Restaurant in Midtown when an inspector reported 20 violations, giving the restaurant a score of 50 out of 100 points.

Under the current rules, the city can close a restaurant for a score of 70 or below.

A few of the problems: cooked pork measured at 58 degrees, cigarette butts in a downstairs room, rodent droppings and a pipe leaking wastewater in the basement.

Two days later, the restaurant scored a 93 in a follow-up inspection. The inspector wrote that all the wastewater leaks had been repaired, the floors had been cleaned and two more employees had registered for a food- handling class.

When a reporter visited unannounced on a recent afternoon, owner Jin Zhao said the business made major changes in the past few months.

He gave a tour of the new freezer and cooler areas, which he said give the restaurant enough space to keep food at the required temperatures and avoid future violations. He walked past a tidy storage room and said a pest control service comes at least once a month.

A few weeks later, the city briefly closed the restaurant again because it had no running water while a freezer was being installed downstairs. It was allowed to reopen the same day.

The restaurant scored a 78 during a re-inspection on March 27, then scored a 94 and 100 in special inspections over the following weeks.

"We changed a lot -- invest a lot, improve a lot," Zhao said.

He said he's proud of his restaurant and that one high score doesn't mean a place is good, and one low score doesn't mean it's bad.

"Most important is safe, fresh, good food," he said.

LESSON LEARNED?

Every table is taken at China King buffet at Fireweed Lane and the Seward Highway.

The after-church crowd in dress jackets and floral dresses heap steaming broccoli and General Tso's chicken on plates. Ice cubes clack in thick plastic cups above the rumble of a dozen conversations.

The smell of fried batter rises to the high wooden ceiling.

In late January, Michelle Soper inspected China King buffet and found only a few minor violations. The restaurant scored 94 out of 100 points.

"This facility was clean and has made huge improvements," she wrote in her report.

It was a good inspection with no critical violations, and a striking change for the restaurant, which the city had briefly closed because it posed a health risk just five months earlier.

China King is the buffet described at the very beginning of this story.

The health inspectors visited it an average of once per month last year.

The city fielded 24 complaints about the buffet -- three times as many as any other single restaurant -- over the past two years, according to Health Department records.

China King's owners moved from China to New York and then Alaska within the past 12 or 13 years, said Yu Lin, son of two of the owners.

Lin said he used to help interpret at the restaurant -- one inspector has him on speed dial on her cell phone -- but now he's away at college, finishing a degree at the University of Oregon.

When a customer has a problem, it can be hard to resolve on the spot, and people next turn to the Health Department, he said. "Since we don't speak English that well, we try our best to make the food better and cheaper than other restaurants."

The city closed the restaurant on Aug. 27, but the next day allowed it to reopen, saying most of the problems had been fixed, according to inspection reports.

As for pests, Lin said there was a misunderstanding with the restaurant's pest-control company: "We thought we were still contracted. They thought we stopped."

He said a company now visits the restaurant at least once a month.

With the buffet recently earning its highest marks in any regular inspection since 2004, the restaurant is a potential success story for the health inspectors.

"They've made great progress," Tofteberg said earlier this year. "It's those moments you cherish because there's so many places that you don't walk out of there with the feeling that you've gotten the point across."

That said, the Health Department closed the restaurant again last Monday.

It wasn't the food, Tofteberg said, but a recurring plumbing problem -- a sewage line packed with grease.

Lin said the restaurant owners don't know whether their business, or someone else's connected to the same pipes, is to blame.

"It's still uncertain what was the cause of the grease clog," he said.

By lunchtime Friday, the buffet had reopened, with two dozen cars in the parking lot. One customer held the door for the other, and they both walked in.

---

Find Kyle Hopkins online at adn.com/contact/khopkins or call 257-4334.

---

BLOGS: A chef writes about Alaska's unique tastes, and a sustainability enthusiast writes about eating local and restaurants that support that philosophy.

adn.com/ak_taste

adn.com/akrootcellar

---

2007 INSPECTION FACTS FOR ANCHORAGE

3,318* regular inspections

94.7* the average score out of 100

22 closures

279 complaints

* Numbers do not include scores for health inspections generated by complaints, re-inspections or enforcement visits.

Source: Anchorage Health & Human Services

---

Department records It's OK to reuse Heinz bottle

You know how restaurants keep refilling the same ketchup bottle over and over again? The city Health Department is OK with that. Ketchup is so salty and acidic, nothing can grow in it, they say.

---

The points system

The city is thinking of doing away with the point-based system for inspecting restaurants.

But for now, every violation is assigned a number of points -- 1 or 2 points for less serious problems and 4 or 5 for the most serious violations.

Here are a few sample violations the city found at local restaurants. Guess how many points each was worth:

1. Dishwashing machine doesn't get the dishes hot enough.

2. Employee wipes her nose, then touches cooked meat in a tray.

3. Ceiling above muffin toaster needs repair.

4. Cleaning rags don't have any chlorine bleach solution.

5. Boxes of food rest on the floor in walk-in freezer, instead of being stored at least 6 inches above the floor.

6. Live and dead cockroaches found throughout the building.

7. Cooked chicken held at room temperature.

8. Washing machine area needs cleaning.

9. Raw hamburger meat stored above open bag of hamburger buns in the fridge.

10. Someone needs to clean slime from inside the ice machine.

-- Kyle Hopkins

Answers: 1) 4 points; 2) 5 points; 3) 1 point; 4) 4 points; 5) 2 points; 6) 4 points; 7) 5 points; 8) 1 points; 9) 2 points; 10) 2 points.

ADVERTISEMENT