Posted on 09/18/2002 8:08:53 AM PDT by jalisco555
An interview with Scott Ritter, Restaurant Inspector.
Q. Mr. Ritter, in 1998 you were dismissed as a New York City food safety inspector after complaints from the “Taste of Tikrit” cafe. In subsequent testimony to the City Sanitation Board, you said the cafe “had mouse droppings in such quantity that they blocked the kitchen exits; the restaurant’s refrigeration consisted of one illegal immigrant waving a popsicle over a pile of chicken carcasses, and the owners were forced to play Led Zeppelin records at 120 decibels to drown out the sound of buzzing flies in the back.”
You also noted that the management has five-year old children operating a rusty meat slicer and uses mace on tardy employees. In your testimony you insisted - rather strenuously - that the city should forcibly inspect the restaurant again, or bulldoze it and jail the owner. Now you say the restaurant is, and I quote, “one of the bright spots in the city’s retinue of quality cafes.” This, despite the fact that health inspectors have been waved off at gunpoint for nearly half a decade. Could you explain your change in position?
Ritter: I believe that the restaurant poses no danger to its neighbors.
Q. So your original remarks about hamburgers moving about under their own power were -
A. Look, it’s ridiculous to think that the cafe is capable of delivering expired chicken to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They simply don’t have the capability.
Q. Well, you did note in 1998 that “the Taste of Tikrit still possesses several bicycles which can deliver a hot entree within a 40-block radius.”
A. Is the cafe threatening to deliver the chicken? Is it threatening to put fliers under people’s windshield wipers? Look, we’re talking about some rickety bikes here; they can barely get ten blocks.
Q. Granted, perhaps. But many former employees note that the management has been buying spare bike parts on the black market for years, upgraded its fleet, and hid these bikes around Manhattan, ready to deliver on a moment’s notice.
A. There’s no evidence of that. We have the cafe in the box; the police regularly patrol the front and the back, and if the cafe does attempt to deliver, we’ll know.
Q. The owner sometimes steps out and shoots at the police as they pass by on patrol; is this cause to revoke their license?
A. Are any police dead? No. The system’s working.
Q. Some have worried that the cafe would give food to unlicensed street vendors, and they could deliver insufficiently refrigerated cole slaw throughout the city, and no one would know where they got it from. After all, your own report says that the restaurant had, in 1998, over 40 gallons of mayonnaise sitting under a heat lamp - and this mayo, by your own estimates, could cause food poisoning in thousands of people. Are you suggesting they have disposed of that mayonnaise?
A. I’m saying that we have to look at why people want to force a management change at the Taste of Tikrit, now. You have to look at what forced the expulsion of the restaurant inspectors in 1998. The city was essentially using the inspection process to spy on the owners, who they suspected of several murders.
Q. 175,327 murders to be specific.
A. I’m not here to quibble over numbers. The fact is, the management doesn’t trust the inspectors, and they’ve good reason.
Q. Just last week you actually went to the “Taste of Tikrit,” and gave a speech at an employee’s meeting. You were also granted access to nearly half a million dollars provided by a friend of the management, in order to make a documentary on the restaurant-inspection procedure. Do you worry that this might compromise you in the eyes of some?
A. Let them say it to my face so I can kick their ass.
Q. Wouldn’t that require them to do a complete about-face?
A. Yes, it would.
Q. And you could show them how that’s done.
A. Yes, I - wait a minute. What do you mean by that?
BTTT
Lileks gets Scott Ritter to a tee.
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