(NYT) — By the end of Wednesday, several restaurant windows in New York are quite likely to display a new attraction alongside the usual menus and reviews: a brilliantly colored placard bearing a letter grade.
But much less visible is the months-long effort by city health officials to prepare for this day — the debut of their controversial new system to rate the cleanliness of the city’s more than 24,000 restaurants with an A, B or C.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has added 23 inspectors to its 157 to conduct annual visits that are expected to rise by more than one-third, to 85,000 from 60,000. The wireless hand-held computers that inspectors use to calculate scores have been upgraded with new hard drives, memory cards and software.
