A city chef writes in the New York Times that when New York’s public health fascists aren’t raiding offices in search of illegal ashtrays, they’re smothering innovation in the city’s restaurants:

What’s been fascinating the city’s chefs lately is a technique long used in France called sous vide, in which serving portions of seasoned and vacuum-packed food are submerged in barely simmering water. This long, slow and low-temperature cooking makes the food taste more intensely of what it should taste like, preserves its nutritional value and often creates a texture of unspeakable silkiness that everyone ought to experience.

Except the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene won’t allow it. In recent weeks, having caught wind of the use of this new technique –not by a single report of food-borne illness but rather through the restaurant coverage of newspapers and magazines — inspectors have shut down the system at many restaurants, standing by to make sure that chefs have destroyed the shrink-wrapped food, fining them for serving sous vide dishes and forbidding the use of the equipment used in their production.

[...]

If it were up to the sanitarians, there would not be known in this country a cheese with its distinguishing mold, a naturally yeasted loaf of bread, a country ham left to hang for 110 days from the barn rafters, and not even a perfect tomato, still warm from the day, unruined by the harsh environment of a perfectly hygienic 38-degree temperature-controlled walk-in refrigerator box.

[...]

The perils and menaces that supposedly lurk in every kitchen practicing sous vide cooking are like the weapons of mass destruction –rumored but not found, yet still cause enough for the sanitarians to invade your restaurant — and pocket hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines out of your daily receipts.

Anyone else creeped out that New York City has a government agency in charge of promoting mental hygiene?

I still say a privately run, Zagat-type certification business would do a better, more reasonalbe, less-corrupt job of policing restaurant food safety than most city health departments.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 11:46 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.