Imagine, if you will, primping and preparing for a date with your sweetheart on a Friday night. With dinner reservations at your favourite little hole in the wall in Chinatown or that family-run restaurant in Little Italy, you’re looking forward to some good food and conversation. But little do you know what awaits you and your bowels.
Food safety in the city is under scrutiny – and, it seems, for good reason. What goes in our mouths should be of great concern to us, and yet the system in place for making the public aware of food safety infractions is seriously lacking.
No one wants to leave a restaurant only to find an hour later they’re rushing down Elgin or Somerset looking for a bathroom. Not very sexy, that’s for sure.
But ensuring a dinner date that runs smoothly is not easy, it seems. in this city, where the only place to find reports on food inspections is online.
The city has had the EatSafe Ottawa program in place since April 2009, but it’s a joke compared to Toronto’s DineSafe initiative. Even the names of these respective programs show how Toronto takes its dining and tourism more seriously and with a more cosmopolitan manner than Ottawa.
All restaurants in Ontario are required under the food safety law to adhere to strict standards concerning the food they serve. The handling, preparing and storage of food are all regulated with great attention paid to keeping hot food hot and cold food cold. Restaurant owners should also be concerned with washing down counters with sanitary spray and sweeping the cockroaches away.
Food inspectors come around to restaurants on a regular basis, or following complaints made by patrons. They write up reports and in Ottawa they post them online. But the truth is, not many people read these reports and restaurants themselves don’t take them seriously enough, because many establishments seem to continue to have critical deficiencies reported even after being given warnings.
The provincial rules do not force businesses to make the inspection reports visible to the public.
Toronto has gone that extra mile to make it a law that all businesses serving food, (even those dingy hot dog carts serving up street meat), must display their food safety inspection notices where the public can see them.
Ottawa has been putting the reports online, but this is problematic for those who don’t know about the program, don’t care to visit the site, or are making an on-the-spot decision about dinner. Tourists especially who are unfamiliar with the city would benefit from knowing what kind of complaints a restaurant has had in order to make an informed decision about where to eat.
It’s easy to post a sign in a window notifying people of a pass or a fail on inspections, and it’s not only good for customers, it’s good for business. If you have a clean restaurant and you follow the rules, why not show it off? And if you don’t, well public scrutiny will get you in the end so better to shape up sooner rather than later.