Special report: Dining with a health inspector

When you’re hungry, probably the only thing on your mind before you order is how delicious it’s going to taste — not how safe it is to eat.

That’s where Eric Mone and his team come in.

“On a routine inspection, we are doing an inspection of safe food-handling practices and cleanliness and sanitation,” he said.

Mone is a Deschutes County health inspector. Making his way around Zydeco’s kitchen in downtown Bend, armed with a trusty thermometer, Mone is hunting for kitchen crimes.

Things like: Is the food stored at the right temperature?

“Foods in the refrigerator should be at 41 degrees or less, is what we’re searching for,” Mone said.

He’s also checking to make sure the food is fresh: “Having all the foods properly labeled is really important.”

Mone also will wander around the kitchen, checking to make sure the equipment is clean.

“We look at little things like the underside of a mixer, because the underside doesn’t get looked at very often,” Mone said.

Another important aspect is: How clean are the staff members?

“Hand wash, hand wash, hand wash. It’s really the main foundation of preventing food borne illness,” said the inspector.

Restaurants start with a score of 100. Inspectors knock off points for every violation.

“A restaurant needs to receive a score of 70 percent or greater to pass the inspection,” Mone said.

If it doesn’t receive that 70 percent grade, it will get slapped with a fail-to-comply sticker. And if it continues to fail, it’s shut down for 24 hours.

But Mone says that’s rare. He wants to work with a restaurant, not against it.

“When the Health Department comes in, it shouldn’t be this crazy situation, or where it’s uncomfortable,” said Stephen Helt, owner and chef at Zydeco. “It’s a good relationship that we have with them. We follow their procedures. They make sense, it makes the food better and makes for a healthy environment.”

So how does your favorite restaurant score? Deschutes County has a searchable database. By simply logging on to foodservice.deschutes.org. you can see which ones passed and which ones didn’t.

But inspectors caution, a violation doesn’t always equal a dirty restaurant.

“If a restaurant is consistently getting a low score in the low 70s, then that shows a pattern that more education is needed for safe food-handling practices,” Mone said. “But the score isn’t really reflective of how safe or dirty that a restaurant is.”

The CDC estimates 48 million people will contract a food-borne illness this year. There will be 350,000 hospitalizations and 8,000 deaths.

For Mone, shrinking those numbers means safer restaurants — and healthier customers.

“We see our role as prevention and education, so we can reduce those numbers and make sure the incidents of that doesn’t occur in Deschutes County,” Mone said.

Deschutes County has roughly 600 restaurants, 125 food carts about 450 temporary restaurants that you see at festivals.

They’re inspected twice a year by seven different health inspectors.

The county Health Department does not inspect grocery stores, convenience stores or domestic kitchens where folks produce and process foods for wholesale. The Oregon Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Division licenses and inspects those facilities.