Restaurant inspections return

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How clean is the kitchen that turned out the meal you are being served?

They were yanked unceremoniously from the Better Living section, followed weeks later by a letter to readers from the food editor. Now, restaurant health inspections have reappeared in print, though I couldn't find them at northjersey.com under Food & Dining.

Still, today's list in The Record of Woodland Park is positively skeletal. I counted 52 towns (out of the 90 or so in the circulation area), but most report "no activity."  

There is no explanation or note in the Better Living tabloid for the list's reappearance. But readers are urged to contact their health departments for more information.

Hospitals fight over profits

The nasty fight among three big, profit-making hospitals over the reopening of Pascack Valley Hospital in Westwood is back on the front page today.

The lead story -- on conservative and liberal opposition to extending Bush tax breaks to the wealthy -- conveniently omits any mention of Governor Christie's tax break for New Jersey millionaires, despite the state's unprecedented fiscal crisis.

Christie's refusal to extend the Corzine tax on the wealthy is a topic The Record's Editorial Page and news columns have avoided like a plague in recent months, probably under orders from Publisher Stephen A. Borg and his puppet, Editor Francis Scandale.

Rare byline

The third A-1 story today carries a rare byline from Staff Writer Jean Rimbach, who doesn't explain why the paper has never reported before that some police recruits pay their own way through training academies.

Rimbach is one of the pets of Deirdre Sykes, head assignment editor. She is among several local reporters whose low productivity is overlooked by editors and managers. 

Last-gasp Democrats

On the front of Local, Staff Writer Michael Gartland reports on continued hiring by the Democratic majority on the Bergen County Freeholder Board. 

The story doesn't say whether Kathleen Donovan -- a Republican who takes over as county executive in January -- will have the power to rescind the appointments of such lightweights as the mayors of Dumont and Little Ferry.

Italian 'fantasyland'

I'm not sure why Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung considers a dining room that resembles a moonlit Italian square to be a "fantasyland." In Italy, restaurant owners give as much care to interior decoration as to buying, preparing and serving fresh food.

She complains about the service at Bella Notte on a busy night, crab cakes and two of the four desserts she sampled, and gives the Little Falls restaurant only two stars (Good) -- equivalent to her rating of Bahama Breeze in Wayne, a faux-Caribbean chain restaurant.

Shame on the food editor

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How well does The Record cover one of the busiest courthouses in the state?

Weeks after The Record of Woodland Park stopped publishing restaurant health ratings in the Better Living section and online, Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill wrote a "letter" to readers today in an attempt to explain why they were yanked after more than a decade (Page 19, Better Living).

One reader of northjersey.com reacted immediately, charging that Sherrill and the former Hackensack daily have caved in to pressure from restaurants.

Sherrill's letter appears in full below, but basically, she says the inspection list wasn't complete, because some health departments refused to supply the ratings. (Wyckoff was prominent among them.) Reporting the results in some towns and not others was "unfair," she said.


Pressure from restaurants

Here is the reaction of  one northjersey.com reader, who refers to the letter as an "article":

Friday December 3, 2010, 10:24 AM - yeahright says:

This article is completely false and misleading. The restaurants in the Bergen County area pressured the Record to stop publishing the health inspection list. IT is so obvious because restaurants in the Bergen County area spend alot of money for advertising in the Record. This is a "no-brainer". I am very disappointed that the Record "caved". I strongly believe that as long as the information was true and accurate, the Record should have kept publishing the health inspection list. The Record is doing a disservice to people who dine out, people who are consumers and to the general public.

Sherrill said another objection to the list was that reasons weren't given for a "conditional" rating, "which can create a false impression that the restaurant is unsanitary." 

Inspectors give reasons


But she neglects to mention that the conditional rating was defined at the beginning of the weekly list as a violation of the health code. And when a restaurant is fined or closed, reasons are always given.


For example, when health inspectors fined Madangsui, a popular Korean barbecue restaurant in Fort Lee, that week's ratings noted it was for thawing frozen meat on the floor. For patrons familiar with the restaurant's claim that it served only fresh meat, the fine took on added significance.


Another popular restaurant, Petite Soo Chow in Cliffside Park, received a rave review from Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung, but in May 2009, it was closed down by health inspectors, who cited "general unsanitary conditions." It reopened later with a "satisfactory" rating.

My wife, my son and I patronized Petite Soo Chow several times, but we stopped eating there in 2008 after seeing a male waiter picking his nose in the dining room on each visit.

The job of compiling the restaurant list was given to a news clerk, who worked from reports faxed to her by municipal health departments. The list were riddled with misspelled restaurant names and other mistakes, and for a number of years, it was my job on the news copy desk to correct them, drawing on my background as a freelance food writer for the paper. At that time, they were printed in Sunday's Local section.

Hungry for food news


The disappearance of restaurant health ratings is another step in the dumbing down of food coverage that began in 2006, when Publisher Stephen A. Borg folded the Food section and promised readers "daily" food news in the general features section, Better Living. 


Unfortunately, then-Food Editor Bill Pitcher, working under the supervision of Features Director Barbara Jaeger, proved to be little more than a glorified recipe editor and he never delivered on that promise. 

Meanwhile, Jaeger went on a cost-cutting drive by, among other things, limiting the restaurant reviewer to a single guest at meals the paper paid for and reducing free-lance food assignments.

Borg hand-picked Sherrill as The Record's food editor this year after she spent several years as food and entertainment editor of (201) magazine, his favorite North Jersey Media Group publication. The magazine still lists her as a "contributor" and she edits its Dining Out listings.

Still, she comes from a restaurant-catering background and her food writing often is celebratory and uncritical. She also thinks nothing of accepting free food, cookbooks and other gifts, and then publicizing them. 

Here is her "letter" on restaurant health inspections:

Letter to readers
Friday, December 3, 2010
The Record

 We recently discontinued publishing the weekly listing of restaurant health inspection reports.

We did this for two primary reasons:

1. The information we receive from local health departments is not complete. We do not get the details about why a restaurant or food establishment was cited as "conditional," which can create a false impression that the establishment is unsanitary, when the citation could have been issued for a variety of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with food safety or cleanliness.

2. Compiling the listings requires the cooperation of local health departments. A number of these departments do not comply with our requests for this information or consistently report "no activity." We feel that it is unfair to report activity in some towns and not others.

Some readers have reacted strongly to our decision, although most we have talked with understand when we explain our reasoning. Like all of our coverage in The Record, it is important that the listings be accurate and fair.

We want to know what information is important to you. Send an e-mail to features@northjersey.com and put Inspections in the subject line.

Susan Leigh Sherrill

Food editor

Disappointing front page

Not long ago, the three stories on Page 1 today would have appeared on the front of Local or inside the section, written by reporters under the Law & Order editor on Deirdre Sykes' assignment desk. 

But I guess Editor Francis Scandale had nothing else for the front page but police and court news, and a vote-fraud probe in Paterson -- the second day this week Silk City affairs have landed on A-1 in the former Bergen Record.

How did Staff Writer Kibret Markos miss the significant jury verdict against a DWI driver accused of being under a "cocaine hangover"? 

He reports on A-1 that the sentencing is "today," meaning the verdict was returned a month or more ago. Markos, who works out of a press office in the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, may be spending too much time on smoking breaks.


One of the few municipal stories in Local today is about 216 new apartments between the shopping centers on Hackensack Avenue in Hackensack, replacing the Best Western Oritani Hotel and a Japanese restaurant, one of the worst in North Jersey.

Splashy restaurant review

In reviewing Chakra, a Paramus restaurant that has a new chef, who serves a $38 steak and a $17 charcuterie platter, you'd think Ung would tell readers if the beef was raised naturally or whether the "hanging meats" in a cold room are preserved, but she doesn't say a word about that. Her rating: Excellent to Outstanding (three and a half stars).

Dirty restaurants get a pass

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It looks like The Record of Woodland Park has pulled the restaurant health inspections list from the Friday Better Living tab --which is filled with restaurant reviews, news and ads -- after many years of burying it in the Local section.


The list is missing today, and a reader of Eye on The Record says he believes there were no ratings last week, either. The last inspections listed on northjersey.com are for Sept. 25. Readers who like to try new restaurants will just have to hope for the best.


For many years, the health inspections appeared in the back of Sunday's Local news section, along with the Dean's List and other unrelated material. Compiled by a news clerk from faxes sent in by health departments, the list often was filled with typos and misspellings when it arrived at the news copy desk. 


One week (it might have been last year),  Roberto Clemente, the dead baseball player, was listed in the paper as "conditional." (It was the Paterson school of the same name that was conditional.)


Although there are 90 or so towns in The Record's circulation area, there were never more than 15 or 20 towns listed, and some towns, including Wyckoff, refused to release the ratings.


If The Record has dropped the list without informing readers, it will ensure that only positive news about restaurants appears in the paper, save for occasional gripes in reviews. That's in keeping with the reduction in food coverage and should boost ad sales considerably, in addition to making the greedy Borgs even happier.

Defendant as victim 

Page 1 has two moronic stories today. 


The major element on A-1 transforms Ridgefield Mayor Anthony R. Suarez into a victim -- just one day after he was acquitted on bribery conspiracy charges by a federal jury, which ignored persuasive evidence of his guilt. An editorial on A-22 says trust in the mayor was compromised by his indictment, but The Record stops short of asking him to resign now, as it did after he was indicted.


The off-lead story on A-1 is ridiculous. Staff Writer Karen Rouse says commuters "should brace for tight squeezes on buses, standing-room only on trains and crowds" at Penn Station in 2018 -- the year new rail tunnels under the Hudson River were scheduled to open before Governor Christie aborted them. Then, she quotes an expert saying if job growth remains slow, the new tunnels probably won't be needed anyway.


But Rouse and her clueless editors, including Francis Scandale, Deirdre Stykes and Dan Sforza, must be the only so-called journalists in the metro area who don't know the buses and trains are at capacity now during rush hour -- why the tunnels were being built and why the Spanish bus system grew so rapidly.

Big photo, no news

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes couldn't find any legitimate news for the front of Local, so she ran an artistic shot of golfers by Staff Photographer Tariq Zehawi, whose talents have been wasted on every traffic accident he comes across. 


There was no Hackensack or Englewood news, and Teaneck reporter Joseph Ax lists streets that will be closed Saturday for the funeral of a police officer, without offering any details on the cause of the violent, high-speed crash of his patrol car into a telephone poll that killed him early Monday.


'Wild night out'


The redesign of the restaurant-review centerfold in Better Living -- more photographs, much bigger headlines and less room for text -- and the limited number of dishes sampled, to save the paper money, are proving to be a disservice to readers.


The three-star review of Picnic -- The Restaurant in Fair Lawn notes the fine-dining venue  wouldn't be appropriate for a "wild night out." I wonder what eating places would be appropriate for that kind of behavior. Maybe the Quiznos sub shop it replaced.


The reviewer, Bob Probert of (201) magazine, doesn't provide a lot of information. Noting the Manhattan-like entree prices, he explains, "This is artisanal work ... using high-quality ingredients," but never tells you whether the lamb is raised naturally or the shrimp wild-caught.


If you're watching your cholesterol, there is no information on butter and heavy cream in the "French sauces" and whether the preparation of dishes can be adjusted if you want to avoid those artery-clogging ingredients.