I fear the Executive Chef with the Negative Scorecards

I'm not much for foodies that can't pay attention to proper holding temperatures. When people talk about the deliciousness of a raw food, I can't help but think about preventive contamination practices. People who went crabbing off the Puget Sound last weekend will undoubtedly have issues with the whole red algae that has bloomed as a result of the recent Bainbridge Island sewage leak. And while I'm still shuddering over the idea of an unwashed carrot plucked from the earth of a garden that used fertilizers from chicken manure, I get shivers when I see people eating less-than-cooked food in a publicestablishment.

That said, I thought the two chefs who made it to Bravo's Top Chef competition, Ashley Merriman, formerly of Tilth and currently of downtown Seattle's pseudo-Roma Branzino restaurant, and the former CRAVE! owner/operator Robin Leventhal were completely AWESOME choices. After all, Seattle's food industry reps have been primarily relegated to Tom Douglas and his chain of restaurants. Ask the current foodies outside of Seattle, and you'll never find the intangibly delicious hole-in-the-wall How to Cook A Wolf, Poppy, or even the hidden jewel of the Capitol Hill area, the Kingfish Cafe. You will, however, get a direct comparison to Tom Douglas. And that other guy. And the place owned by that one guy. You know, the one with the really neat...thing. That one. Yeah.

But me being me, I can't not look at the records of a King County Metro Region chef. T and I have been watching the series for the last year and the only thing I almost always wonder is what the food is really like. I grew up with amicrobiologist and a public health inspector, so I know that you can find the records of places in the King County Metro region online. The list of closures always makes for interesting (and illuminating) reading.

Crave, Leventhal's former cafe and eatery business, is no longer open. Leventhal is currently shop-less, but due to my intense lack of trust regarding kitchens (especially after reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Waiter Rant and a few other salacious reads of the seamy side of the skillet) I spent a few times tracking down her health ratings online before eating at Crave. My response was pretty much always positive and followed what I’d find on the county public health records site: clean, decent kitchen with spotless floors and good prep, with the ability to see what's going on in the kitchen. It was like a high-end Subway, except that you could seeLeventhal carefully crafting your dinner to fit your currently paired wine., usually with fantastically teased hair poking from a hat or bandanna. Leventhal loved to meander out and talk with her folks, and even when exhausted, pulling myself to a meeting in the adjoining theater, she crafted a perfect triplegrande mocha, and left an espresso bean on top for me with a smile. The kitchen was smaller than my current kitchen - though commercial, it left nothing to the imagination nor could Leventhal hide her mistakes anywhere but the round file. Most importantly, I remember peering through her county public health records and realizing that, like many other places that do artisan food in small kitchens, she passed her inspections with flying colors before I set foot in the door for some drunken figs, mac and cheese, or their chocolate dessert.

Of course, Leventhal's popularity and the sheer impatience of many a Seattle diner echo. We tend to enjoy instant gratification, and Leventhal's Crave was the epitome of small kitchen cuisine. If a list formed of customers longer than ten, there was a wait, and the residents of Seattle's Capitol Hill are not used todisappointment regarding their feeding times. Most of Leventhal's critiques on the local reviews involve the wait times in her kitchen - not surprising when one woman is doing all the serious foodie work for you. Of course, being housed in the now defunct Capitol Hill Arts Center might explain more of thefunkified atmosphere - my time spent at the Lower Level (the bar downstairs) drinking Vo-Tang in a seriously cheerful atmosphere.

Ashley Merriman? Not so much. Oh, she still passed, and her reviews online in the local newspapers and Yelp are complimentary, if not obscene (references to acts of physical love and the duck burgers at Tilth are commonplace on both). But the colors were distinctly devoid of the adjective “flying” by any standard whatsoever.

I want to like Ashley, I really, really do. I want to know that she's a talented chef who has had a few slip-ups in the kitchen. I also want to think that cleanliness is also subjective where food is concerned.

But. It's not.

An anonymous friend told me less than five minutes after talking about Merriman and Tilth online that during Merriman's tenure, quote:

Went to Tilth for dinner one night. The first problem came upon being seated: a GIANT chunk of parsley in my not-terribly-large water glass. An easy thing to notice (HAY!GUYZ! There is a giant green chud in a glass of clear liquid that i am about to take out to a table! Maybe I should not bring this particular glass to the table! OH WAIT, NOEZ, THEY WONT NOTIS. Perhaps they will take it as a hint of our earthiness!)

It definitely set a tone for the rest of the meal.

After hearing a few other stories online, I'm not surprised, and I'm not publishing the others. Really.

At the grill yesterday, prepping for a dinner cookout with family and kids, I cleaned it fastidiously with soap and water, flamed off the metal, dried it with a high heat, and sluiced it down with a towel soaked in a light lime juice and olive oil mixture. During my grill time, one single, beautifully shaped hunk of meat fell to the brick, and in the garbage it went. I can't muck around with that sort of thing outside on the brick patio; I sure as hell won't do it in a commercial kitchen. It's lessOCD and more of a phobia backed up with years of experience staring e.coli bacteria right in the face (well, through a microscope, anyway).

And unfortunately, when doing the research on Merriman's kitchens (Tilth and Branzino), a pattern emerges.

Tilth currently holds two red critical violations during the last reported inspection for food holding temperatures and for food worker cards not being present. While that’s not damning in of itself, it reflects exactly the first consultation at Branzino that cited improper cooling temperatures and a lack of food handler cards. While Merriman may not be at fault for the practices at Tilth, she is most definitely responsible for the practices of Branzino - she has had over a full years' experience working there. The similarity of the violations is also damning in many ways.

And the only commonality between the two, at the moment, is Merriman.

I don’t assume that a kitchen staff are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. My first foray into the culinary world resulted in my running in sheer terror from the filth of a kitchen that advertised itself as “kosher”, and I know that under the pressure of making and building food from scratch, sometimes things fall apart.

But I know that one of the most important things I can have from a chef who supposedly has my culinary interests at heart is to know that what comes from his or her hands is clean food that is well-prepared following the minimal guidelines of public health.

Do I care about the flavor, the presentation, the panache, the ability of the chef to combine foods in dazzling combination? Oh, absolutely. But I also want to know if the chef merely rinsed off that delectable lamb chop after it fell to the ground, that the internal temperature of the food has risen to a safe temperature that kills any unknown microbes or holdover bacteria. I want to know her food prep staff are licensed and were able to take a class that requires a bare minimum of food safety instruction.

Merriman's only independently objective assessment shows a track record that says she is incapable of doing the bare minimum of responsible behavior as a lead chef in a kitchen. Her artistry with food is not my concern. The potential for her food making it feel like a team of howler monkeys are trying to claw their way out of my lower intestine for eight hours straight most certainly IS. For one thing, I live with a nurse, and he's quite capable at leaping towards me with a needle, prepped to give me an injection that will make the bad monkeys go away.

As for the competition? I know that every single chef out there has at one point brushed off an egg and served it to a customer. I know that soup has been chilled in five-gallon buckets instead of shallow pans, making it a breeding ground for the bacteria responsible for most “food poisoning”. I know that cremebrulee might have a little extra "flakiness" to it. But I hope they both know that first and foremost, I better not see a damn thing, and second, if they get busted by a public health inspector, on a scheduled visit, they're DOING IT WRONG.

But the establishments Merriman has worked at as “top chef” have been busted several times. They’ve never been closed, but it’s obvious that Someone Is A Slow Learner.

Even a quick dance over to the New York City Public Health Inspection website, which carries (like most others) a record of two years in public health inspections notes that Butter, Merriman's alma mater kitchen, hasn't had the same kind of issues that Tilth and Branzino have had. So it's not like Merriman hasn't had an opportunity to know where to put the spoons after you finish using them, or what it takes to keep a sink stocked with clean hand-washing tools for her staff. Repeat offenses, to me, are an implication that she simply doesn't place a priority on the safety of the eatery's food.

And perhaps that's unfair. I know that if I tracked my own mistakes in a work environment over the last three years I'd be wondering what kind of slacker I actually am. However, when I screw up, it's a period out of place. When a chef screws up, it's a potentially dangerous health issue. I pay to have my food cooked well, and to have it cooked safely.

I also know that Tom Douglas is able to run multiple food establishments in the city of Seattle, none of which, in two years, have had a red critical violation or a citation above “you’re out of soap in this dispenser” - with Douglas rumored to drop everything and get the issue corrected before anything else happens in the kitchen (unconfirmed, but it might explain why I've seen him more than a bit huffily preoccupied at a local restaurant supply store, twice).

It’s not just attention to the food. It’s attention to your work environment. I know Bravo’s going to gloss over most of these things, but in the simplest of things that a public eatery MUST succeed at passing – a government inspection –Merriman has lost both my potential custom and my respect. Simply put, I'm afraid of eating her food for what it might contain, and I'm afraid of endorsing her business because she seems to operate outside of the legal requirements for her employees (which is like failing to learn why one should wash your hands). Getting a food handler's card is not terribly hard, and even the busiest kitchen staff should be able to find a test time within their schedule, so one wonders why Merriman's crews aren't doing it. If I have time next week, I might even do it just to see what it really takes. I'll even do it without studying.

But, in the meantime, I'll be watching Top Chef on Bravo and hurriedly collecting all the episodes I can on whatever service I can (Hulu, TiVo, YouTube, VCR, whatever) to keep up with my Seattle culinary crew. I have a feeling that Bravo's producers collected people from around the country with an intention to develop this season with strong, differing flavors and regionalcompetitions, to see how people shine. But to quote a friend who checked my reservations about Merriman before I published this article, "That's so very Seattle."

Indeed. I know. I'm whinily concerned. It is nigh on our city's pastime to analyze, bitch and then moan (sometimes in a reverse order) about someone else's efforts at artistry, talent, or skill. But I do take my art seriously; if art kills, or the culmination of that art makes someone very ill, it's not something I think should be celebrated and/or slid under the rug.

Regardless of whether Merriman or Leventhal win, or find themselves Top Chef of Season Six, the half-apathetic nature of the Seattle residents will find reservations and increased revenue of their respective businesses increase, regardless of their past, or their performance on the show, or how many people have mouth-induced orgasms over their food. Seattle loves our losers and our winners regardless; but we'll happily wave, and let the door hit you on the ass on the way out if you leave us.

As a side note, I am planning on working up pre-premiere bios of at least four of each of these folks prior to the release of the show, if only to give a bit of balanced coverage. Watch for future updates and/or snarkasaurus tracks.