By: Zack Bradley
Inspecting your favourite restaurant is about to get a lot easier in Ottawa.
Ottawa Public Health is launching a new website on November 16 called Ottawa Safe, which will highlight a restaurant’s food safety rating with easy to see colours. The project is similar to the system used in Toronto, which requires all food premises in the city to place their colour-categorized results near their front doors, but Ottawa’s ratings will be solely online.
The trial project will see restaurants labelled as green, yellow, or red, with each colour matching their level of compliance with city food safety laws.
While Ottawa Public Health already has a website detailing food inspection violations, Ottawa Safe will be an improvement on the system, says Kathryn Downey, Manager for Food Safety at Ottawa Public Health.
“We want to enhance the disclosure of what exactly we are doing and make our inspections public knowledge,” says Downey. “By having yellow ratings, this gives an incentive for businesses to stay compliant and keeps the public more aware of what is actually happening inside of restaurants.”
Keeping restaurants in Ottawa compliant can be a difficult task as some food premises have tallied up high numbers of violations over the past few years and continue to operate without the public ever knowing.
According to data recovered from the City of Ottawa’s open data website, a handful of restaurants have received more than 20 violations in past years and did not do anything about it the next year. Business such as Sushi Kan, Ben-Ben Restaurant, Yang Sheng Restaurant, and Delta Ottawa City Centre all fit this picture. Receiving more than 25 violations in both 2013 and 2014.
Even more shocking is the results of Yang Sheng Restaurant and Sushi Kan, as they both actually saw increases in their amount of violations, with their violations rising by 34 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively.
Downey says she hopes this new system will help crack down on this repeat non-compliance.
“The bottom line is we have the authority and we expect compliance,” says Downey. “That’s our intention. We want every restaurant to follow and expect to see ongoing gains.”
Downey says having the coloured inspection ratings only online is much cheaper than having to hand out physical signs after each inspection, as done in other cities such as Toronto. However, she notes Ottawa Safe is only a trial project and window place cards could still be a thing in the future.
For now, Downey says by having it only online the public’s view is actually enhanced, as they can see all of a restaurant’s inspections results at the same time as its coloured rating. This is better than just seeing red, yellow, green in a restaurant’s window, she says.
However, not everyone is on board.
John Macklem, manager at the Lieutenant’s Pump, says the new system could be dangerous for restaurant owners since violations happen more than the public may think they do. He says he thinks people may not simply scroll down to read the actual violations and just judge restaurants by the colour they receive.
“It can be frustrating because there are a lot of small violations you can get and I’m scared that you may get stuck with a yellow rating as a result of some small, trivial technicalities,” says Macklem.
As manager of Lieutenant’s Pump for the last two years, Macklem says restaurants are always catching up and making repairs to meet inspection results, but this does not mean they are unsanitary.
“Maybe your fridge isn’t at the right temperature or your walls are bit dirty, these are just normal things happening in a restaurant,” says Macklem. “These types of violations are much different than an actual restaurant that has bad hygiene. I don’t want to be attached to those places simply by having a yellow card.”
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