Food safety a priority on and off campus

Hopefully you’ve never found a cockroach in your dinner.

Whether eating on- or off-campus, it is important to know exactly what is in the food and that the food has been cooked and handled properly. Bon Appétit, which operates all of Penn Dining’s facilities except those in Huntsman Hall, has many protocols in place to ensure food safety at Penn.

“Food safety is our top, top priority,” Stephen Scardina, resident district manager of Bon Appétit, said.

He added that all of Bon Appétit’s chefs and managers, among other employees, are ServSafe trained in food safety, certified by the National Restaurant Association and must seek further certification from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.

“Our chefs and managers also do a bi-monthly self-inspection and must report everything to their direct supervisor,” Scardina said. Before opening a food operation, Bon Appétit employees have a pre-service “ten at ten” meeting where issues like food safety and new menu items are discussed. Penn Dining also does quarterly inspections of its facilities.

“We also make our chefs and others who handle food keep detailed time and temperature logs of everything,” Scardina said. “The absolute maximum that food can be kept out is four hours, and typically we are so busy that the food is never out for that long anyway.”

To control possible pests, Bon Appétit hires EcoSure to inspect every dining facility once a semester, which is a precautionary step not required by the Department of Public Health. Sardina added that all of Bon Appétit’s operations have received the best ratings possible from EcoSure so far.

This year Bon Appétit has brought in Dan Connolly as their registered dietician and nutritionist. “Not only does [Connolly] make sure that the nomenclature and personal identifiers are all correct, but he also does spot checks like temperature across our facilities occasionally,” Scardina said.

Connolly works directly with students with dietary concerns like allergies to help guide them through Penn’s dining facilities and find meals that work for them. “Dan also helps students to establish a personal relationship with our chefs and other employees, and that personal relationship is something we really value and emphasize,” Scardina said.

Despite all of these precautions, there are sometimes cracks in the system. College freshman Victoria Greene suffered firsthand from a lapse in food safety at 1920 Commons in August. She was hospitalized after eating food labeled ‘vegan’ in Commons.

“I have a serious food allergy to dairy, so I avoid anything with milk in it,” Greene said, adding that she was afraid to eat at the dining halls at first given her situation. “I slowly became more comfortable with [eating at the dining halls] and was having success with food with the vegan label on it.”

The food that Greene consumed when she got sick was found to contain small amounts of cheese, she said, but was not labeled as such.

“It was a wholeheartedly unpleasant experience,” she added.

Following her hospitalization, Greene’s meal swipes were converted into dining dollars to allow her to better control what she would be eating from Penn Dining in the future. She now buys a lot of her food at Gourmet Grocer and cooks her own meals in her dorm room.

“It’s not terrible — I’m well-fed and I’m not starving — it’s just a little difficult to keep up with everything,” Green said. “A lot of the time I just resort to microwavable noodles when I’m too busy or lazy to cook.”

Both Bon Appetit and Penn Dining declined to comment on Greene’s case, citing privacy concerns.

Food safety extends off campus

While dining dollars and meal swipes do not transfer over to off-campus restaurants, concern for food safety certainly does.

Alex Yuen is the owner and operator of Beijing Restaurant at 37th and Spruce streets. The oldest son of a father who spent decades in the Chinese restaurant business, Yuen obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering before taking over his father’s restaurant.

“Somehow as an engineering and science guy, I was always interested in how to cook food,” Yuen said. ”I learned about food safety and how germs and microbia spread while in college so that I could get into the business.”

The Chinese food that Yuen’s restaurant prepares calls for a wide variety of sauces and condiments, so each sauce is prepared and bottled separately to avoid cross-contact. “That is something that a lot of other places just can’t do, because they don’t have the demand or the volume needed for the system to work,” Yuen said.

Yuen has his chefs be safe with more than just the myriad of sauces. “We do the most safe thing, which is to steam all the vegetables at a very high temperature and to cook the meat consistently all the way through before we even put it in the wok,” he said. “Meat, eggs and really any perishable is really dangerous if you don’t cook it to the proper temperature.”

“Not to point a finger at anybody, but I always told my children to never eat from a food truck,” Yuen said.

Yuen has had longtime concerns about the sanitary conditions of local food trucks, hinting at some of the ones that line Penn’s campus.

“Philadelphia normally requires that you have a licensed, commercial kitchen to sell and serve your food, and most of these food trucks don’t have that,” he said. “Many don’t have access to running water, or to a real bathroom.”

Beijing has a checkered inspection file with the Philadelphia Office of Food Protection at the Department of Public Health. Documented in Beijing’s most recent inspection report from December 2014, there was “visible physical evidence of rodent/insect activity observed in the dish washing and dry storage area” as well as “mouse feces observed” in the restaurant.

The inspection also found black residue and pick slime in the restaurant’s ice machine bin, as well as food kept almost 10 degrees warmer than required by law. After discussing these issues with the Daily Pennsylvanian, Yuen gave the DP a tour of his establishment, ensuring that all of the food product was stored at the proper temperatures.

“Sometimes when the health inspector comes, he can’t understand my manager because he has such a thick accent,” Yuen said. “So [the inspector] ends up misunderstanding things. We fix everything he said was wrong but when we call for him to come again, no one shows up.”

Beyond the regulations of the Department of Public Health, Beijing is a Penn-certified caterer, which enables them to provide food for University-sponsored events.

“We tell our customers strict times when they should no longer eat the food and not to keep leftovers,” Yuen said. “After so long the food drops to a certain temperature and bacteria has a great chance to spread and multiply and make you sick.”

A few blocks over from Beijing, Alan Segal and Dave Clouser have owned and operated Wishbone since October 2013.

One of the only health violations documented at Wishbone from their last inspection, in May 2014 was the absence of a sign in the restroom to remind employees to wash their hands.

“We bring an academic angle to food safety and are very disciplined,” Segal, who previously taught Culinary Science at Drexel University, said. “It’s something that we take very seriously.”

Wishbone serves roughly 150 to 200 customers a day and is best known for its fried chicken.

“One of the benefits of a limited menu — like chicken — is that there is a lot less risk of cross-contamination,” Segal said. “We were lucky to get a very big kitchen, so it’s easy for us to keep everything separated.”

Segal and his partner built their kitchen from scratch, so they had the opportunity to install new, easy-to-clean floors and walls, as well as brand new cooking equipment.

“When people from the industry walk through our kitchen, they always say that this is the cleanest kitchen they’ve ever seen,” he said. “We have multiple cleaning cycles throughout the day, not just at the end of the night, so [the restaurant is] always in a state of being pretty clean,”

“For us cleaning is non-negotiable — we spend a fortune on cleaning products,” he added.

Segal appreciates the work of the Department of Public Health, but would like to see Philadelphia adopt the letter-grade system that New York City has. He said the public display of inspection results is “a great way to bring it forward and encourage everyone to keep their kitchens clean.”

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