What's in the Kitchen?

D.C. restaurant health inspections are hidden from view.

SHORTLY AFTER her husband's inauguration, first lady Michelle Obama joined D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty; the mayor's wife, Michelle; and Jill Biden, wife of the vice president, for lunch at Georgia Brown's, the Southern-cuisine restaurant two blocks from the White House. It was a glamorous foursome and a boon for the restaurant. The event's afterglow, however, would seem to have been dulled when, a few months later, D.C. health inspectors cited the restaurant for a variety of hygiene violations, including improper hand washing, inadequate separation of raw and other food, and tobacco use in the kitchen.

But how would anyone know? The last time the District's restaurant health inspections were posted online was 2003. Today, unless a restaurant is ordered closed by the health department, customers have no access to inspection records short of filing a written request and waiting weeks or even months for it to arrive in the mail, or making a personal plea at city hall. That policy allows restaurants that should be shamed by lax hygiene standards to flout them without consequences. Elsewhere, inspection reports are readily available, online and otherwise.

We don't mean to pick on Georgia Brown's; plenty of restaurants are cited for violations of varying degrees of severity, and the better ones generally take prompt steps to address the problems, as Georgia Brown's said it did. The point is that the public, which takes nearly half its meals at restaurants, coffee shops, cafeterias and the like, should have easy access to hygiene information about those establishments. Legislation sponsored by D.C. Council members Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) and Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) would require Washington's eateries to display letter grades (A, B or C), derived from health inspections, prominently in their windows. The bill is modeled on a law that's been in place in Los Angeles County for a decade and one that will take effect in New York City next year. Restaurants hate it, insisting it should be enough for the health department to post inspection reports online. But studies suggest that diners like having the letter grades posted in restaurant windows and that hospitalizations caused by food-borne illnesses declined in Los Angeles after the new policy was adopted.

The problem with the Cheh-Bowser bill is that it provides for no additional inspectors or funds to supplement the District's paltry corps of 15 inspectors, who in theory are responsible for checking some 5,000 eateries annually. The shortage of inspectors is a particular problem given that the bill promises prompt re-inspections for restaurants that are cited for problems, so they can clean up their act before being publicly embarrassed. If the District is going to tighten inspections -- a great idea in theory -- better to do it right than make a further mess of an already shaky regime.