John Jay Health Code Violations Exceed City Average

John Jay Dining Hall at Columbia was cited for 32 violation points this January, while Hewitt Dining Hall at Barnard performed comparatively well with nine violation points.

According to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Web site, a score of 27 or less is required for a restaurant to pass an inspection, and a total of 28 or more points is considered a failed inspection, which would require a follow-up compliance inspection to ensure that necessary changes have been made. The city-wide average is 14 points.

John Jay received the sixth-most violations of 145 restaurants inspected in the area, and the second-most on the University campus, topped only by Ferris Booth Commons in Lerner Hall, which received a total of 33 violations. In the year 2006, Ferris Booth Commons was the University’s only eating establishment to receive a perfect score of zero.

“These inspections are extremely subjective, and it must be noted that there was a new inspector this year,” said Scott Wright, Vice President of Housing and Dining. “Some of the ‘violations’ were unfair and unjustified. We will be contesting some of these allegations and believe that some will be waived.”

The number of violations in John Jay has fluctuated greatly in recent years, and Wright attributed this to the subjectivity of the inspection. In the past, inspectors have docked Columbia for dust on fan covers, used tape measures to examine the precise width of air gaps in the plumbing, and questioned the size of sinks.

Specific critical violations like “evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas” have repeatedly been noted in inspections over the past three inspections—problems the administration attributes to the challenge of operating large food facilities during winter temperature changes and in a residential building.

“We had major issues this year with the conditions the individual rooms were left in over the winter break, and several incidents of food left open in rooms were reported,” Wright said. “The issue is more to do with getting trash out of the building and individual rooms fast enough.”

Barnard’s Hewitt Dining Hall, however, received only nine violation points­—a marked improvement from past inspections, most notably a failed inspection with 43 violations in 2006.

monica.varman@columbiaspectator.com