Go, Louisville! 
Our restaurants here are rated as well. I would definitely have second thoughts about eating in a C restaurant.
Well, there’s different levels of ethnic restaurants here and I’m mostly talking about the “mom and pop” hole-in-the-wall type restaurants. I’m not quite too sure how it’s ‘insulting’ in any way, it’s just a fact of life that small family businesses where most of the staff doesn’t speak English fluently probably don’t practice food safety up to Western food code standards. There’s always exceptions, but around Los Angeles at least, it seems to be fairly common.
Speaking of Chipotle, I seem to get mildly sick every time I eat at Chipotle. Damn them and their delicious burritos.
This is basically how I look at it too. I don’t totally refuse to eat at restaurants with bad ratings, but I also am not very willing to shrug it off as “nitpicky stuff.” Most of my life experience suggests that people and businesses that have a lot of little seemingly harmless problems also have a lack of caring or attention to detail. And a lack of caring can lead to more serious problems also.
I’m pretty sure that if you look closely enough, you can find at least one health code violation in just about any restaurant. But if a restaurant has a whole bunch, even if they’re seemingly silly, it means someone either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care, and I don’t really want to eat there.
All that said, in practice I’m not very paranoid about this stuff. We don’t have grades posted on the restaurant here, and I never bother looking up the reports online (except one time when I had a really bad experience and was curious to see if the place had a bad record). When I’m in California, I do look at the signs, but I wouldn’t be afraid to eat at a B. A C, maybe. I definitely wouldn’t eat sushi from a C…
Yep, but you know the common wisdom in Singapore though right?
A= Awful
B= Barely edible
C= Can do
E= Excellent
F= Freaken Awesum!
Of course the above doesn’t appply to Indian Rojak 
Seriously, in reply to the OP, so long as it gets a pass from the relevant authority I don’t care what grade it has, I will eat there.
My ex-wife used to eat at a C-rated all-you-can-eat sushi place with coworkers in Pasadena. She never paid the price for it, it seemed, but the thought of it was really disturbing.
Hmmm…EX Wife? As in dearly departed ex wife? U a widower:D (sorry…not auspicious I know, but my mind is not nice :eek:)
Brit here, what does it actually mean?
I’ve never seen or heard of this term before.
I’ve heard too many horror stories from friends who work at Harkins.
“Roaches in the ice machine? Take 'em out and serve these customers! No, no time to change the ice!”
"Dead rat discovered in the popcorn machine? Change out the popcorn! No, don’t worry about the dozen people you’ve already served!"I can only imagine how much worse it is at places dedicated to food.
You know how Shrek says “O’aight”? It’s that. 
It means “all right.”
Cute, but to my knowledge, she’s still very much alive. 
Cheers, ignorance fought !
I ran a restaurant for several years. IME, the health department (Santa Clara County, California) could be beyond nitpicky, and well into the realm of ridiculous. Just a couple of examples:
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We had a couple of make-line units, the lower portions of which were refrigerated storage. On top of the temperature gauge built into the unit, I kept a cheapy hand-held electronic food thermometer in each unit as a backup. During an inspection, the inspector found a third thermometer in one of the units, which was broken. What it was doing there, I don’t know - my guess is that when the cooks were pulling everything out of the unit to clean it (on a daily basis, I might add), they were just tossing the broken thermometer back in. They were probably afraid to throw it away without asking, and it never got brought to my attention. Anyway, I got dinged for “having an inaccurate thermometer in the unit.” Never mind that the other two worked just fine, they were accurate, and the temperature of the unit was where it was supposed to be.
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In an effort to combat graffiti in the bathrooms, I tried to keep items that could be carved into or written on at a minimum. Instead of using the standard type of paper towel dispenser, I found a type of wicker basket with a lid, that had the perfect dimensions to hold stacked paper towels. I bought one for each bathroom and bolted them to the walls. Come the next health inspection, I was told this was not acceptable. I explained my reasoning to the inspector, but she didn’t care. Ding! Now, in this case, my attitude was “fuck that.” I’m not going to keep spending upwards of $40 for a new dispenser every time someone carves into it - which was all the damn time. So I left my baskets. In inspections after that, sometimes I’d get dinged, sometimes I wouldn’t. I think it depended on how much other crap the inspector could come up with to ding me on.
Which leads me to the other point I want to make: a perfect score is not possible. The health inspector will always find something wrong, no matter how inane it is. Otherwise, he or she wouldn’t be doing their job.
So after these things, what was your grade?
Heh… I should have realized I’d be asked that.
The two examples I gave happened on different occasions. Also, when I worked there (left in '05), California didn’t have this “grading system” I’ve read about in this thread. Are restaurants really required to post a big letter grade in their window? I would have flat-out refused to do that, regardless of how good/bad the grade was.
Anyway, we were given a score out of 100. I can’t remember specific scores, but I don’t recall ever getting one I thought was bad. In the 80s and 90s, I’d say.
Yeah, restaurants are required to post it right in the front window. Man, I would never go to a restaurant that doesn’t have it posted in the window around here. . . that means something shady is going on.
Well then. I’m wondering how many home kitchens could pass an inspection.
My restaurant hasn’t had an inspection in a long time. I expect the inspector to show up at any time now. I spend a lot of time “busting” my cooks for doing stupid shit that they know isn’t acceptable. EVERYONE needs to wash their hands more often, and they are all getting tired of me saying it. EVERYONE needs to make more liberal use of their sanitation solutions. I am also getting tired of putting out grease fires on the saute station because the stove doesn’t get cleaned enough, and doesn’t get done correctly when it does happen. Its freakin’ hard to keep up with everything…
For example, In the morning, I would occasionally find food (that was held hot and covered the night before) simply placed in the cooler, still covered. I would shake my head and grumble as I scooped the offending product into the trash can. I didn’t understand why that one product was improperly cooled, placed right next to the cart full of ice-chilled and uncovered leftovers (read: properly cooled) or why it was happening on such a regular basis. I was preparing a lecture to give to every cook to re-educate them on proper food chilling, when I finally figured it out last week. Turns out a dishwasher was trying to “help” by breaking-down the steam table in the back where I held extra food that might be needed for dinner service. The cooks were breaking-down the main steam table properly, but the dishwasher was just putting the hot food from the other steam table into the cooler.
Just last night I scolded another dishwasher for drying a ladle with his apron, and then latter for not washing the last dish of the night (he lazily sprayed it off, so he could finish work and go home). Fuck, sometimes I wish I could just pull up a chair and watch every little thing these guys do during the day.
If we get a bad health inspection score, it will happen on my day off, when the cooks don’t have me riding their ass all day about sanitation. Our food is stored properly, there are 2 thermos in every cooler, and the bug traps are EMPTY. I’ve got everyone labeling and dating everything, and once a week I purge the walk-in of anything suspicious. I took the advice of a former chef, and I inspect EVERY cooler EVERY day. And thanks to this thread, I am going to hunt for non-working thermos tomorrow.
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If you read Amblydoper post you can see what kinds of mistakes an employee can make. I can easily see an employee seeing the broken thermometer at the right temp and then ignoring the two working thermometers, causing the food to go bad. In any case, such a thing is a very small ding as you fixed it before the follow up inspection, right?
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You can appeal the inspectors ruling, you know.
I have seen restaurants and other buildings inspected here in Santa Clara County that got a 100%. It’s not easy, I admit.