On November 4th, Plate, a restaurant industry magazine, reported that according to the Baltimore Sun restaurants in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maryland had been targeted by a phone scam from a person purporting to be from the health department. The idea is to get the restaurants to provide confidential information that can somehow be used to access their accounts.
I received such a call about three months ago right after we relaunched Heartland in our new location. Of course, I knew it wasn't the health department since my caller id showed a California area code. Besides, my inspector had just left two hours earlier, and she's not a man with a heavy foreign accent.
The scam goes something like this: The caller states he is from the health department and that he needs to speak with a manager due to numerous complaints of food poisoning due to tainted food. If the manager takes the bait, the caller tries to secure personal information that can be used to compromise the restaurants security. Sometimes the manager is asked to call another number and enter a code before providing the information.
I am fortunate to have a very close working relationship with the City of St. Paul's Department of Environmental Protection. Kim Carlton is our inspector, and she is great about providing constant information and helpful tools so that we can stay on top of the latest code changes and best ways to avoid any contamination problems. Kim is a good egg. If we ever had a problem, she would call me personally to investigate it. It is my understanding that most municipal health departments would have similar policies in place whereby the inspector assigned to a specific location is the first point of contact when an alleged problem arises.
Consequently, when I received the call, I confronted the caller who immediately hung up. It was pretty comical last week when moments after reading the report of similar calls in Plate, that the phone rang and, lo and behold, it was another scam artist pushing the same scam. I told him I knew it was a scam, and he actually admitted that it was. I had to ask him to repeat himself because I could barely believe my ears. So he did. He said, "Yes. This a scam." It was actually kind of refreshing. I almost told him to have a nice day before I hung up on him.
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Recently on his blog, Chef Stewart Woodman of currently mothballed Heidi's and formerly of Five and Levain, took extreme umbrage with the fact that our restaurant had been given a rating of 97 out of 100 on something called the Restaurant Rater atop a review by Beth Dooley in MSP magazine. His point was not without merit since he said that a rating like that should naturally mean that the restaurant is nearly perfect. He wanted to know if Beth was of the opinion that Heartland was among the finest restaurants in the world. He went on the say that we must be, or we would never have received that rating. On the other hand, he suggested, maybe the rating was inflated and not valid at all.
Andrew Zimmern then responded on his blog by essentially telling Stew that he was taking the whole rating thing much too seriously. I know that since I was alerted to the whole exchange by a regular customer who suggested that I check out Andrew's blog.