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Monday, December 3, 2007
Will You Dine at Home For Christmas?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Have you ever eaten out for Christmas dinner? Did you end up eating Chinese like the Parker family in “A Christmas Story?” Were you out of town and had nowhere else to go? Did the chestnuts roasting on your open fire explode and set fire to the house? Were you marooned in an airport somewhere, singing Christmas carols over the phone to your loved ones? Did you have to work? Perhaps you went on an Austrian ski vacation? A cruise?
What’s your most memorable Christmas dinner in a restaurant?
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What do you think of using letter grades to score restaurants?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As of today, health inspectors across Georgia (except Fulton — more on that later) will be using a new checklist in performing restaurant inspections. The rule changes also include a new scoring system, which adds letter grades to the familiar numerical ones.
The new rules are designed to take off more points for conditions that could cause foodborne illness, and fewer points for things that might be unappetizing, such as a dirty dining room, but not as much of a health hazard.
For consumers, the most visible changes will be the letter grades, and where they’re posted. As inspectors make their rounds, visiting all the restaurants on their lists over the next six months, they’ll be checking to make sure that inspection forms are posted in drive-through windows as well as within 15 feet of a restaurant’s entrance, where forms must be readable from one foot away. (The idea is you can check a place out before ordering or committing to a table.)
As of today, the posting rules take effect, even on old forms. So you should be reminded much more prominently of a restaurant’s cleanliness. Do you look for these scores when you dine? Before you dine? Have you ever changed your mind about eating somewhere after seeing an inspection score?
Fulton, by the way, is planning on adopting the state code early next year. It’s the only health department in Georgia that can write its own codes. Want to know what’s going on in the other counties? Check out these links to their Environmental Health departments, where the inspection scores are posted online.
Cobb/Douglas. Click on environmental health in the left menu and then follow the pull-down menus.
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