It’s time for another episode of America’s favorite game Name that Crime.

In this episode, a New York restaurant that earned a top grade of “A” barely five months ago was shut down after the owner made a recording on his iPhone of an inspection by the city health department.

George’s, a 60-year-old downtown fixture that had to be rebuilt after the attacks of 9/11, was shuttered after the inspector became aware that owner Bill Koulmentas was crafting a memento of his visit. The diner was slapped with enough violations to close it down.

Among the offenses, totaling 65 points (28 is the cutoff for the lowest grade, a “C”), were harboring cracked eggs, keeping cold food too hot, and keeping hot food too cold.

The New York Post reports that Koulmentas decided to record the visit after “Inspector Kenneth Reid began writing one trumped-up violation after another.”

At one point, Reid crawled under a dishwasher and reported finding 13 roaches in the wall. So Koulmentas repeated the procedure but came up bugless. He offered the inspector $1,000 if he could produce a single roach.

But Reid had other fish to fry—or prevent from being fried, as the case might be. Among the violations he recorded was the contamination of a batch of cooked potatoes and peppers “by one loose screw (approximately one inch in size) resting on food surface on grill.”

Koulmentas protests, “They can do anything they want. Something’s out of control here. It’s lies, lies, lies.”

The New York City Health Department received low marks of its own after the local FOX affiliate performed an undercover investigation of several Starbucks coffee branches that had received “A” grades by inspectors. Swabs taken from countertops and self-serve milk dispensers revealed the presence of  Enterococcus, fecal strep, E. coli, and Klebsiella.

In the case of George’s, a Health Department spokesman quoted by the Post defends the inspection, noting that previous inspections of the restaurant turned up a plethora of violations. Still, when you read about police arresting citizens for the “crime” of recording a traffic stop, you have to wonder how far an overzealous health inspector is willing to go.

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• Transit police wrongly detain man for taking pictures
• The war on salt and personal freedom heats up
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• New York restaurants will be required not only to make the grade but to reveal their GPA

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
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