One day last month, a New York City health inspector showed up at the juice cart at 54th Street and Avenue of the Americas where Long Huynh works. The inspector spent about an hour examining ingredients for freshness, and making sure the work equipment and surfaces were spotless and organized.
“He got up all inside there,” said Mr. Huynh, 54. “But I am very particular. I clean the inside well.”
Mr. Huynh’s diligence was rewarded Friday when his cart became one of the first to receive a letter grade from the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A placard bearing a blue A was affixed to the front of the cart. ”They gave me the big one,” he said.
Since 2010, city inspectors have been assigning grades to restaurants, which are required to post them prominently, as a way to heighten awareness of food safety and hold restaurants more accountable. Though owners still complain about the fairness of the grading, and the fines that accompany violations, the practice has become more or less accepted; today, more than 90 percent of the city’s 24,000 restaurants receive A grades.
Until now, the more than 5,000 food carts and trucks have been inspected, but not graded. On Friday, the health department handed out the first 22 grades, in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. All but a few were As, the department said.
The immediate response, from both vendors and customers, ranged from approval to a collective shrug.
“It was a pretty easy process,” said Ahmed Eltawil, 46, who works at the Casablanca Halal Food cart in Harlem, which received an A, even though it was cited for minor violations like improperly maintained flooring and improper storage of ice-handling utensils. “These grades are a very good thing for business.”
The department announced in November that it would begin grading the carts and trucks, and attaching location-sharing devices to the vehicles to help inspectors find them. The move followed passage of a bill sponsored by City Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz that Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law in June.
“The customers who buy food from a street vendor deserve to have the same ability to make an informed decision as patrons of restaurants,” Ms. Koslowitz said this week in a statement. “The A, B, C or ‘Grade Pending’ carries with it real significance.”
Corinne Schiff, the city’s deputy commissioner of environmental health, said food carts and trucks would be evaluated on the same criteria as restaurants, by the same set of health inspectors and with the same schedule of fines. All the violations and grades will be posted online.
She said the department aimed to grade all mobile vendors in the next two years. To aid in the effort, four inspectors have been added to the inspection staff of more than 100.
The Casablanca Halal Food cart in Harlem received the top rating. “These grades are a very good thing for business,” said Ahmed Eltawil, who works there.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times
While some aspects of restaurant grading — like a bathroom inspection — aren’t as relevant to food trucks and carts, Ms. Schiff said the vehicles were susceptible to the same kinds of violations. “Space is something that we all contend with in New York,” she said. “It can be a challenge to hold food at the right temperature or have the right equipment whether you are a truck, a cart or a restaurant.”
But Matthew Shapiro, the legal director of the Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy group for vendors, disagreed. A cart or truck “is a much smaller space, with limited refrigeration and hot holding areas, and a potable water tank instead of water from the building,” he said. “I am not saying it is easy to run a restaurant, but vendors have unique challenges, while still being held to the same standard.”
Several vendors said Friday they were content with the new grading system. Nurun Nabi, 50, who runs a fruit cart on Avenue of the Americas near 23rd Street (which also received an A), said the inspector was very considerate. “They don’t give me a hard time,’ he said. “They ask everything very nicely.”
Vendors and restaurateurs who receive less than an A are given a chance to address problems before a reinspection. At a news conference on Friday, the health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, said her department no longer fines businesses with top grades for minor violations.
“As part of getting an A, we waive those fines,” she said. “The purpose of this is not to fine vendors, but to make sure they are meeting these standards.”
Some customers said the new grades didn’t seem to carry much weight.
“I still don’t think the food here is clean,” said Scotty Kamaladvin, 71, a retired maintenance worker, eyeing the A grade on a halal cart on Avenue of the Americas at 29th Street that he has been frequenting for decades. “But I like this guy. It is cheap. My children wouldn’t eat it, but it’s convenient for me.”
Mohammed Diallo, 38, an I.T. engineer, said he paid more attention to Yelp reviews of food carts. “The A grade doesn’t make me feel differently about a place,” he said. “I like the food that I like: Mediterranean, halal or African. I don’t feel better about a McDonald’s if there is an A.”
The most distinctive aspect of the new policy is the location-sharing device that will be installed on each cart or truck. In the past, the department used data analytics to pinpoint locations, but they weren’t always accurate. Now, as each vehicle renews its one- or two-year health department permit, the device will be installed. Then the cart can be graded.
To protect the privacy of vendors, department officials said, location data will be deleted from the department’s internal database after 24 hours.
Still, Mr. Shapiro, of the Street Vendor Project, worries about the ways the devices could be misused, especially since some vendors are undocumented immigrants, living in fear of detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“If ICE had a list of names that happened to be mobile food vendors and told the health department they needed the locations of these vendors, would the department comply?” he said. “That would be the worst-case scenario. We are supposed to be a sanctuary city.”
A health department spokesman, Michael Lanza, said, “We couldn’t do that because we don’t store the data by name,” only by location.
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