I have a healthy anxiety when it comes to health inspectors. Talk about a bureaucratic position that can grab you by the service industry balls and walk you around by the scruff of your scrotum as they look in every nook and cranny for fallen food particles or remnants of roach shit 20 inches under the shade of an old prep cooler. They are the closest thing to boot licking that you can ever catch my lips lappin on the crest of their non slip dhec issued sketchers.

To be fair I’ve gotten along for the most part with 90% of the health inspectors I’ve dealt with over the years. Nine times out of ten as long as you’re making the effort of following all 8,482 guidelines with additional tabs that fluctuate yearly they’ll recognize you as competent and allow for some out of the ordinary hiccups.

They’re human and so are we.

Most of them are I should say.

What’s it like dealing with health inspectors well let me tell you.

Imagine taking a course in college. The most important course of your college career. You’re very competent in class. You show up for everyday day on time. You are judged publicly in this class by your peers for things such as your appearance, knowledge, grades, behavior amongst other things. You turn in your homework on time, you get A’s on all your tests. In fact you’re expected to.

You know you’re going to have three to four tests a year but you have no idea when the professor will spring them on you. Also to add a little more stress to your classroom you have 20 plus other students in your study group that you must have cliff notes handy to share your criteria. If they don’t know the answers to some of the questions on your test you both fail.

No sweat.. also just for fun let’s say some of those in your study group are folks made up of alcoholics, drug addicts, dealers and some that only have a 6th grade reading comprehension.

It may be 8am on a Monday morning or 5pm Friday afternoon when the professor pops in with a quiz. You may not even be in class. You might be at the beach with a little paper parasol resting in your solo cup getting a tan (extremely relevant). Your professor might be a brand new one you’ve never seen before and has a different way of testing. There might be new curriculum you had to study for that was emailed into your junk box 5 months ago. They do that a lot. Your professor might’ve had someone tell them to go fuck themselves in the classroom next door and now they are having a terrible day and wish to share with someone else.

They give you the surprise exam. One of the folks in your study group has a nose picking problem. Professor looks up and shakes his head. Writes something down. Another just had her hair done for a hot date that night and decided to wear her hair down. Professor checks something on the clip board. Someone forgot to replace the batteries in one of your classroom tools. Or they just threw the tool in the trash because it cannot be found. Another check.

Professor -“hey, you remember when the correct answer for the last 15 years was 42? Yeah well now it’s 41. Also the procedure we asked you to do meticulously for the last test has changed. Someone got the shits from it so we’ve decided to change all aspects of logic and follow through and now it’s a 5 point deduction. You should’ve received an email about it 13 minutes ago when we updated our site.”

After about an hour of this quiz the professor sits down with your test in hand and berates you for a solid 30 minutes. Imagine your professor grading your test right in front of you every single time.

They subtract all the points and for about 20 seconds you’ve lost the ability to do simple mathematics on your own because you’re hoping that 100 minus 15 equals no less than 90.

Nope you received a B. It’s a sold B but it’s still a B. You get a B on your report card and bring it home to your mom you probably won’t get your ass kicked. Hell I would’ve kissed someone’s ass for a B in school. I was a C student my whole life.

So the professor assigns you a B. Then they pull out this giant sticker out of a folder that reflects your grade and sticks in on your front door for the whole world to see.

Imagine being in college and your grade being posted on the door of your classroom. You’re whole college career is judged based on two grades. A- well that’s the standard. You’re supposed to have straight A’s. Anything else under that grade and you’re a terrible student. Newspapers may post your grade with generic explanations. Online articles exposing your grades along with boomer’s exclaiming how much of a dumbass you are and they wish to never step foot into your classroom.

Exaggeration? Ok just a tad but very very relevant.

I can count the B’s I’ve been apart of in 30 years on one hand. And for me that’s still too many.

My first week as km at the Blockhouse I got a B. The inspector Pam was very courteous and cut me some slack because I was fucking clueless as to what I was doing. I voluntarily took a class to better educate myself after Pam’s suggestion and it was all A’s at the House after that.

Raw oysters bring all the inspectors to the yard.

I was apart of 2 B’s at Arizona. One as a cook when I first started and one as the GM when my key hourly shit the bed. I don’t put all the blame on him I should’ve educated him better but it was ugly. The KM was terrible too but he had opened the store and had better job security than I did.

I dealt with a couple of B’s in the other steakhouses when I was regional. Chances were if you got a B and I showed up with a suitcase in my hand then that meant someone was going home. That happened twice.

My restaurants? No B’s. It wasn’t an option. I’ve seen how the public reacts to them. I didn’t instill fear by any means but there were warnings. I’ve always been a little uptight about inspections. My old company it was unwritten but if you got a B you lost your job. Well unless you were golfing buddies with the owner. I had been traumatized by one specific health inspector I had at the steakhouse for a solid decade. I won’t say his name. I don’t even speak his name aloud anymore. He’s been retired for sometime. I check his name in the obits from time to time to see if it’s time to celebrate.

About a year after I was hired at the steakhouse we had a little grease trap leak that had ran all the way onto Woodruff rd. I was a key at the time but not keying that day. We had a visitor from ReWa and DHEC to come survey the situation. I wasn’t privy to the conversation from the km at the time but it seemed he was having a heated argument with the health inspector by the leaking manhole. The inspector, we’ll call him Adolf, was around 5’6”, head to toe in grocery bag brown suit, glasses at the end of his nose, acutely trimmed mustache and his face gave way to someone completely devoid of a sense of humor. Or what you would call a bureaucrat. As my km was ripping his face off he showed no emotion whatsoever. He stood there with a clipboard in hand scribbling furiously. When the conversation was done he asked for the owner, walked with him to the front door and audibly slammed the big fat B decal on the front door facing the Merovan center.

Arizona had officially made an enemy. When I became GM I also inherited this enemy by protocol.

I was a salaried manager for the steakhouse for around 14 years. Of those 14 years I specifically had Adolf as my inspector for a solid 10. His stature, parted hair and short trimmed mustache makes the name fit. And his overall demeanor. He also used to tell some terrible off colored jokes and I’d fake laugh so hard and then go home and punch pillows to keep me from throwing up.

I despised this man’s existence. Look I get it. He was disrespected while trying to do his job but it was obvious that he was already a captain cunt well before that argument had been established. For years I asked inspectors that proceeded him their thoughts on having him as a coworker and they all had the same wince and smirk. Having a bitter health inspector with a Napoleon complex will keep you on your toes. For a decade I kept one eye on the back dock door every 4 or 5 months for that jackass.

He’d always arrive right when you forgot about him with his DHEC ID around his neck, fat tie that was tied too short, pleated brown pants and brown sports jacket. Summer days he’d show up in a short sleeve button up with the same short tie and a pocket protector to hold his thermometer, pen and little packets of sani wipes that resembled Trojans. I hope he used condoms. I have this irrational fear of him procreating and his short hitler youth children following his legacy. Like some version of a DHEC wunderkind.

He never made direct eye contact with anyone he’d look down through the glasses of his nose and stare at your neck or chest depending on your height. His voice was nasally and condescending as was his demeanor. He sighed with open mouth exaggeration. Almost like “ok dipshits, let’s see how you fucked shit up again today.”

He had a little wand/stick with a mirror on the end of it and look under our waitstation for debris. If there was no debris to be found he’d mark us for mold build up under the wood cabinets. He probably used the same stick to look up under women’s skirts.

He’d check the temps of our sauces and just to be safe he’d go back one more time right before he left just to be sure they were still holding temp. If they were supposed to be 145° and it read 144° he’d mark it. “That one degree difference could could be the difference between life and death”

Yours or mine jackass?

We had a reinspection one year actually every goddamn inspection had a follow up because that’s how Adolf played ball. I had missed one thing and when he asked me about it I was honest and told him I didn’t see that one deduction. Looking down from his glasses he turns to my KM and asks “Do people not know how to read anymore?”

If we had received an automatic letter markdown I had intended to follow him out to his car after inspection and slam the door on his cranium. Yeah sounds hilarious but I was at that point. Or at least trip him up and watch him fall on his face on the asphalt. I get warm fuzzies just thinking about it.

One inspection I went to the restroom to wash my hands only to discover someone had a bout of stomach issues and sprayed shit all over the bathroom stall wall. I grabbed a handful of c folds and proceeded to wipe/smear the shit off the wall before he came in to inspect it. I got incredibly drunk that night.

Our restaurant was old. The steakhouse had only been around 7 or 8 years but its bones were old. Electrical was the out of date amongst other things. Every summer all three walk-ins would struggle with the outside heat. I kept an emergency line open to my purveyors to lend me a refrigerated truck to throw all of our stock in when the coolers shit the bed. One hot summer afternoon as I was relaying 80lb boxes of sirloin butts to the refrigeration truck outside Mr. Adolf popped his head in the back door. We weren’t even close to another inspection but he saw an employee moving stock to the truck so he decided to be a good inspector and make sure we followed protocol. He watched me move three coolers of stock into the truck all the while sticking his thermometer randomly into items to make sure they stayed cold during the short transfer. Three hours he did this and then left without saying a word.

I hated that man.

Still do. If I saw him out in public I’d probably spit on his glasses while he was wearing them. Big juicy one.

The last time I saw him he let me know it was his last inspection he was being transferred. Not sure what reaction he was expecting maybe a high five which I wanted to give him but with my fist balled up.

He left and I got off of work and celebrated with a bottle of vodka.

I thought all was well and good but I’ll be damned if the next health inspector walked in 6 months later on Valentine’s Day morning while we were prepping and he had a trainee with him. You never want to see an inspector walk in with a trainee because that mother fucker has something to prove.

And he did. We had an awesome three hour inspection all the while trying to set up for Valentine’s Day service.

After that things settled down a bit. We had another inspector put on out route and our inspections mellowed out.

Some inspections can give you a bad rap. The public’s overall perception of these are if you have anything less than an A on the door then you have a rodent infestation.

Or your cooks are leaving band aids in food, roaches are fucking on top of your plates, spoiled food in the coolers, servers wizzing in the sweet tea etc.

Often times it’s things you don’t think about like a prep cook has their drink with a lid sitting next to their prep counter instead of just under it.

They find a crack in the FRP and just assume bugs are living inside of it.

One of your managers put wrong wattage bulb under your hood and your lumens aren’t lumened enough

Your hand wash sink is dirty

Your mop sink doesn’t have a back flow stoppage device on it. That’s 4 fucking points man.

Some places are absolutely disgusting. I’ve worked right next door to a few that were terrible. I understand the need for inspections. I’m not against them at all. But sometimes they make mistakes too and it can cost you. I got marked down two points for taking off a pair of vinyl gloves that were too tight. I had put them on right in front of the inspector, took them off to put a pair of large gloves on and she marked me for not washing my hands after changing gloves. I literally had them on for 6 seconds. Had those 2 points put us under a B I would’ve gone postal. I’ve seen the remarks people make online about bad inspections. All they see is the letter grade. Sometimes the cunts at the local press will post them online to sell tickets for clickbait.

Assholes

I’m a level one class now. Which means they only want to visit me maybe once a year. The only danger people have with me is the tiny bit of bacteria that comes from slicing fruits and veggies. I’m ok with that. I still have Adolf in the back of my mind each time I get inspected. The positives is it made me quite militant when I personally inspected my kitchens and comes in quite handy when I’m consulting new restaurants and even my upcoming one. I have a list a mile long that I need to take care of without having to contact dhec first.

Don’t go telling DHEC I’m out for their ass because I’m not. It was just that one little Adolf mother fucker that I despised.

I guess this cropped up in my head while I was making a punch list for opening up the deli.

At least I don’t have to fill out a ridiculous spreadsheet anymore.