New York restaurants will be required not only to make the grade but to reveal their GPA

Restaurants will be required to display their letter grade—scarlet or otherwise—in a prominent location.

I'm not sure of the exact number of restaurants in New York—the website of the local CBS television affiliate WCBS has the number at 24,000, while the New York Times Dining Journal fixes the total at 25,648. What I can tell you with certainty is that under a new ruling from the New York City Board of Health, all 20-odd thousand will now be required to display a letter grade rating the establishment's cleanliness. The letter grades, which will be color-coded—A will be blue, B green, and C yellow—are to be displayed in the restaurant's window or vestibule, if it has one.

Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, whom nothing gets past, observed that he'd prefer to eat at a restaurant with an A.

The WCBS article quotes Health Commissioner Thomas Farley as saying, "The grade in the window will give you a sense of how clean the kitchen is, and it will give every restaurant operator an incentive to maintain safe, sanitary conditions."

All well and good, but a question arises: How far do New York taxpayers want their government to go in helping them make decisions that are allegedly for their own good? A related question is how far can a government go in forcing a business to advertise negative information about itself? At what point does the New York City Board of Health become guilty of restraint of trade? The New York State Restaurant Association

has already raised the first of what are sure to be many objections regarding this policy.

This is not the first time the city government or mayor's office has appointed itself Big Brother of city restaurants, not to mention the customers who would frequent them. Back in January, as I reported here, Bloomberg issued an edict that restaurants cut down on the amount of sodium. Now, as then, the model for the policy is a system currently in force in a liberal city, in this case Los Angeles, which uses an A, B, C, grading system.

Understand, I have no problem with the health department here or anywhere doing its job. And I would certainly be as reluctant as the next person to eat in a restaurant with health code violations. At the same time, knowing exactly what misconduct a restaurant was guilty of might be relevant to the decision. Some violations border on the compulsive, such as improper placement of the choking sign. Telescoping this type of information into a letter grade is a little too Hester Prynnish for my tastes.