Health District Considering Rating Restaurants With Star System

How clean is that restaurant your eating in? You may be able to find out soon enough just by looking at the star rating it got.   

The Central Connecticut Health District is looking at establishing a rating system that would grade a restaurant or eatery with 1-4 stars depending on how well it passes its monthly health inspection. 

The idea is still in the planning stage, however CCHD has been presenting it to local town councils and is looking to creating that new system sometime within the next year.   

“What we’re hoping for is that we develop a system that is based on the inspection and based on the risk factors,” said Director of Health Paul Hutcheon. “So, depending on what type of violations were found, that determines how many stars you get.”   

Hutcheon said CCHD — which services Berlin, Rocky Hill, Newington and Wethersfield — is working on coming up with software that would turn the health department’s current 0-100 point rating system into this star-based system. The software would issue certain star ratings depending not only on how many violations a place got, but how serious the violations were.

So, when you go out to a restaurant, you'd be able to check its health record by how well it scored on the star scale.

Restaurants are already inspected on a monthly basis and docked 1-4 points depending on the severity of a violation. As an example, the four point violations are the most egregious, and among those are issues like not having food cooked at the right temperature, workers who have infectious disease, no hand washing facilities and toxic materials improperly stored, Hutcheon said.   

With that, Hutcheon said, that system can be a little misleading to diners.   

“(A restaurant) can score a 96 and that sounds like an A or an A+,” he said.   

But if that restaurant got one four-point violation then that would not be represented in the point score.

Hutcheon said that a restaurant with a collection of minor violations could therefore have a higher star rating than a restaurant with two or three large violations.  

Whatever happens, Hutcheon said this new system won’t be coming anytime within the next six months, but when it does, they will let the public know.