SPOKANE, Wash. – Each restaurant in Spokane is inspected at least once a year to make sure it is following the proper food safety precautions. However, there are also precautions you can take as well.
"Make sure that you are not ordering your meat under cooked, things like raw oysters and sprouts avoid those if you are at high risk for food borne illness," said Spokane Regional Health District Public Information Officer Kim Papich.
Those in the high-risk category are children, women who are pregnant, the elderly and anyone with a weakened immune system.
Also pay attention to the temperature of your food. If it is not as hot or as cold as it should be, send it back. Another tip from the health department, look at how the wait staff handles your food.
"We need people in the kitchen to be using gloves, tongs, some kind of barrier between themselves and the food that's actually going to go into your mouth," Papich said. "If it's a kitchen where you can view it from where you're eating, you can keep an eye out for things like that.
One restaurant that does have an open kitchen is Café Italiano on the South Hill.
"We just like to run open kitchens because it allows you to see where the food comes from, allows you to see the people doing the cooking, and we think it just allows for a cleaner environment," said Vagelie Karatzas, Café Italiano employee and the restaurant owner's son.
However, for the kitchens you cannot see, you can check for heath violations online.
"We have lots of procedures and enforcement in place where if we do see one of those violations that they are re-inspected, and they're not able to operate unless they've rectified that violation," Papich said.
To view a health report online, visit www.srhd.org. On the left hand side of the page click on "Food Establishment Inspections," under "Quick Links." Then click, "Go To Inspections Report."
The next page then explains how to read the report. For example, there are 418 possible points a restaurant can score on the inspection. The more points a restaurant receives, the more safety violations it has. Therefore, zero is a perfect score.
Once you have read the report explanation, click on "Search Inspection Reports." This will allow you to put in the name of a specific restaurant and pull up its health records for the past several years.
Violations are also broken up into red and blue categories. Red violations are the ones you want to pay attention to because they pose a higher risk for unsafe food conditions.
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