On cognitive dissonance

Are there any restaurants you simply refuse to eat at?

My one-time favorite restaurant has a horrible record of food safety. Nobody who is familiar with what I’ll call “The Spot” will be surprised by this. The restaurant is located not inside of a real building but rather in a gap between two buildings that someone paved and put a tin roof over. (New York City, baby!) This means that the internal walls of the restaurant are actually the external walls of the neighboring buildings. The bathroom is a weatherproofed shack with rudimentary plumbing. The tables and chairs are made from plywood and sloppily coated in tempera paint. 

The Spot has a distinct vibe of a children’s clubhouse in an abandoned lot and, in fact, the owner once explained to me that his intention was to create exactly this type of informal hangout. The abandoned shanty aesthetic wasn’t part of the plan but budgetary restraints ultimately precluded such luxuries as walls. 

The Spot

Fortunately, The Spot serves fried food, which is a great food safety hedge against unsanitary kitchen conditions. Quite simply, frying oil gets hot enough to massacre all bacteria and even mechanically disassemble toxins that regular cooking wouldn’t destroy. If you ever find yourself eating at a dubiously hygienic eatery, remember this fact and indulge yourself in the oiliest delicacy on the menu.

This was my strategy at The Spot and I employed it faithfully — I nom’d no fewer than three egg-gravy-and cheese-on-a-biscuit sandwiches per week for two years. Out of a sense of professional duty I accessed their health department score history in NYC’s public restaurant score database* and discovered a slew of mediocre inspection results. Whether it was a flawed professional assessment or cognitive dissonance, I remained undeterred by these lapses in food safety. Or perhaps it was the sheer convenience of having a four-dollar, eight hundred calorie hot breakfast within spitting distance of my apartment. Like a hippo protecting her offspring, I would kill before letting anything get between me and that precious, dripping glob of sustenance.

But even the health department demerits against The Spot did more to reinforce its beloved character than suggest any imminent health hazards. Sure, the equipment was rusted and the building was not exactly a building—but did I mention the heartbreaking tenderness of those buttermilk biscuits?

There was just one thing that needled me —most of the staff had legitimately horrible food handling practices. The surest way to avoid food poisoning is to have clean hands when preparing food. The general rule is to wash your hands and change your gloves every time you switch activities. So if you scribble down a customer order, you should wash your hands and don new gloves before preparing the sandwich. But most importantly, you must wash your hands after handling money or touching the cash register, because those things are dirrty. It was clear to me that the hands delivering my biscuit sandwiches weren’t getting sudsed up enough.

 A career restaurant worker once told me that a restaurant cash register is dirtier than a toilet seat. I shudder to imagine what possible experience could have prompted this specific analogy, but the point stuck.

I knew the staff well enough to mention it a few times—not in an asshole way, I swear!— but it didn’t take. Apparently their boss had instructed them to use as few gloves as possible because “gloves are expensive.” (Official guidance says gloves should be switched at minimum every twenty minutes.) 

One time I saw an employee count bills with a gloved hand, wipe his nose, and then pick up a biscuit for slicing. I stepped out of the sandwich line, wiped a tear from my eye, and never went back.

*The historic scores and current inspection ratings have somehow vanished from the database.

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