People Get Ready

A taco truck owner complained to me recently that he was harrassed by Safety and Permits while a Subway restaurant was being renovated at Claiborne and Washington avenues.

Although he invested a significant amount of time and money to obtain the correct permits to operate — and had no problems until the Subway showed up — he asserted that he was forced to move his operation after he received increased scrutiny by Safety and Permit workers, coincidentally, just before the Subway shop opened. On a daily basis, he was forced to stop serving while he was subjected to inspections of cleanliness, food temperature, dates on stored food, etc.

He has since moved that taco truck far from Claiborne Avenue. That’s unfortunate, because he has some of the best tacos in town, and from my own visual inspection of his kitchen’s cleanliness, and his frequent hand-washing, his operation is very clean. By the way, that’s in marked contrast to a particular Mexican restaurant operating in a Mid-City store front next to Angelo Brocato’s, which gave me the worst episode of food poisoning I’ve ever experienced — including the two years I spent in Honduras.

If Safety and Permits were actually doing its job, instead of serving the agenda of E. Coli vectors, maybe that taco truck would still be operating Uptown, and maybe — just maybe — we could be more certain of how clean the food we eat is.

My recommendation to the Council, if they’re interested in getting rid of the Subway which skirted zoning laws to open on Magazine Street, is to do what Safety and Permits did to that taco truck operator: Make it so inconvenient for the shop to operate that it has to move elsewhere.

That is, of course, until the Inspector General, Robert Cerasoli, has an opportunity to ferret out nefarious activities of inspectors, and to put systems in place to prevent harrassment.