The Regulatory Burdens of Opening a Restaurant in NYC

Not too onerous, as a new restaurant opens in NYC about every two days:

http://www.nycgo.com/?event=view.article&id=78912

 

Ya, but most of the food is baked in mouse shit. Although that's preferrable than trans fat.

 

Divide that out by the population, that's not that impressive.

 

Restaurants have vermin problems if they have poor food storage standards or their kitchen isn't as clean as a hospital operating room--which they should be. Doesn't matter whether it's a AA place or a greasy spoon.

 

A buddy is thinking about opening a restaurant. He does catering and we talked about at lunch today.

The hurdles you have to jump are amazing and I'm not close to NYC. Even in my town, you got a list of about three pages to check off and that's assuming you aren't serving alcohol.

I'd hope it is hard. I don't want to get sick because of some slimeball slinging up rat shit burgers.

 

Regular vermin problems? Sure, food storage or cleanliness issues are a problem. Though if you think any restaurants are as clean as an operating room, I advise you to never, ever go look into the kitchen of any place you enjoy eating.

But *all* restaurants will attract random, one-off bugs and vermin.

 

Exactly.

Did you read the article?

The new program helped Mario Batali open 15 weeks earlier than it would have without their help. That's nearly four months. How long a process should it be to open a restaurant? (And we still don't know how long it did take him.)

I think we can all agree that we want our restaurants to be compliant with sanitation & food prep regulations.

But, do you really think the 30 different permits, and 23 inspections by 11 different agencies all have to due with food safety?

Not hardly.

 

I have been in a number of restaurant kitchens and and you can eat off the floor of a lot of them. Professional restaurateurs are absolutely anal about this.

And we're not talking one-off situations which can easily be controlled.

 

I've worked in several restaurants, and my experience is quite different than JR's.

 

I'm a big fan of restaurants with an open kitchen.

 

I'd venture a guess that even borderline restaurants (vis-a-vis cleanliness) are cleaner than the typical home kitchen.

Still, you have to wonder whether another approach might have been advisable. Yes, it's legitimate for there to be governmental oversight in this industry. Given the prominence of this industry to the NYC economy, it's not surprising that the regulatory burdens are relatively substantial. But, come on, your solution to a convoluted bureaucracy is to create another department to help people work their way through it?

 

Isn't that the best part?