Getting the check first

Daniela Delvalle and Shawn Korach eat out about twice a week. The couple, who are expecting a baby, say they pay attention to restaurant inspection reports.

"I'll see the score and say, 'Oh, I guess I picked a good place,' " Ms. Delvalle said.

That will become even more critical "once our child comes," Mr. Korach said.

Later this year, before going to any restaurant in the state, they'll be able to go online and see not just the inspection score, but also the reasons behind it.

Health officials are working on a new Georgia Environmental Health Information System Web site that will allow consumers to pull up recent scores and view the inspection forms with specific violations and inspector notes. That information should allow consumers to better judge what a score means, said Mike Allison, the environmental health manager for the Richmond County Health Department.

Until more information is available electronically in Georgia, all Richmond County restaurant-goers can get is the score from the last inspection, Mr. Allison said. That can be misleading because a restaurant could have a major violation, such as undercooking hamburgers, and still get a 91, he said.

"It looks like on the one hand they've got a really serious violation and they still got an A," Mr. Allison said. "(Whereas) with a couple of small things that are just not as serious as undercooked beef, you drop all the way down to B. So if you just look at the score, you don't really know. What you really have to do is read what we have written here."

Taka Wiley, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Division of Public Health, said in an e-mail that the Environmental Health Information System will "be available online by the end of this calendar year," but she did not specify when.

Local health departments were preparing for an April 1 launch, but that was pushed back to July 1.

"The development and implementation of EHIS has taken longer than the projected schedule indicated," Ms. Wiley wrote. "One of the major challenges we have faced include converting and transferring the existing data from each of the independent local Environmental Health systems. This has caused unavoidable delays."

SOUTH CAROLINA OFFERS a statewide searchable database of scores but not inspection reports, and there are no plans to add them, said Adam Myrick, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Most South Carolina inspectors use an electronic inspection form on a notebook computer to upload to a state database, a process Georgia is just now implementing. That should make the exchange with the Georgia database much easier and ensure the information is updated quickly, Mr. Allison said. Health inspectors in Richmond County are using seven notebook computers recently supplied by the state, and Columbia County inspectors expect to begin using theirs later this month.

Kevin Goldsmith, the owner of the TakoSushi restaurants in Evans; Augusta; Aiken; and Greenville, S.C., said even when the new Georgia resource is available he doubts his customers will find it very useful.

"Because they won't understand, necessarily," he said. "If you're not in the business, you don't understand why they're taking points off. If you've got a jug of soap that is closed sitting on the wrong shelf, they can take five points off. Are you scared of an unopened bottle of soap? No. But if you have it sitting in the wrong place, you can get penalized heavy for it."

And the evaluation system can be highly subjective, he said.

"I'm sure that like anything else you can learn some valuable info from it, but you can catch an inspector on a bad day in a bad mood that one day gives you a 98 and the next day gives you 62," he said.

Restaurants in Evans and Augusta are evaluated differently, Mr. Goldsmith said.

"We have to roll our silverware differently in Evans than we do in Augusta," he said. "It's hard to keep up with all of this. And Aiken and Greenville are totally different than the two here."

The silverware rule is one where inspectors have to rely on what they see, said Giles Roberts, a program manager for the training unit that covers food service inspections in the Environmental Health section of the Georgia Division of Public Health.

"It is open for interpretation by the field inspector based upon what he sees," he said.

The state changed its rules to try to standardize what criteria and forms inspectors were using to make enforcement more uniform, but there will still be differences between inspectors, Mr. Roberts said.

"You will never get that totally out of the system," he said. "There's no way to do it when you're dealing with human beings."

Some of the rules seem to fly in the face of well-established cultural practices, Mr. Goldsmith said. For instance, prepared sushi rice has to be used or discarded after four hours.

"Everywhere else in the world, rice is good for two days," he said. "So what happens in Evans? Are there special microbes in the air that ruin the rice? Rice has been kept like that for thousands of years, sushi rice in Asia."

Mr. Allison said it is because spore bacteria could sprout and proliferate if the rice is kept out longer than that.

"You have a four-hour window," he said. "Once it enters into that danger zone, it has to be used or discarded within four hours."

Mr. Goldsmith said he tries not to sweat the scores he gets.

"I don't honestly worry about it a whole lot. Some days we get great scores; some days we don't," he said. "But you know what? My restaurants are all clean. We're very careful. We have to be (because of the sushi). We have to be incredibly careful."

Mr. Allison said he thinks the public will find the new information helpful, particularly when people can get the whole picture.

"I'm hoping that the public will be able to see what we have," he said. "This way, if you said, 'Let's go to Augustino's tonight for dinner. How'd they do on their last inspection?' You could pull something like this, and find exactly what the inspector did."

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.