Its about time!!!

Some San Francisco restaurants could soon face every school kid's nightmare -- a bad grade.

A San Francisco supervisor wants restaurateurs to post letter grades, based on the cleanliness of kitchens, prominently in the windows of the city's 4,000 bars and restaurants.

Los Angeles has had the system in place since 1998, and as some who have eaten there have attested in dining surveys, walking into a restaurant with an A in the window feels a lot better than eating at one with a C. But in San Francisco, a place where national culinary trends are born and restaurant revenue fuels both the economy and the political machine, restaurateurs consider the proposal the equivalent of suggesting that someone is using real rats in the ratatouille.

The restaurant industry, already feeling beleaguered by a bad economy and pending $1.75 increase in San Francisco's minimum wage, is likely to come out swinging. Already, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association is calling the grades the equivalent of a scarlet letter. Mayor Gavin Newsom -- only recently divested of his interest in a handful of San Francisco restaurants and bars and the beneficiary of campaign support from the restaurant industry -- opposes it.

"It's unnecessary in San Francisco,'' the mayor said last week from Washington, D.C., where he was attending the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "Our public Health Department is a model for code enforcement and is working with the restaurant industry.''

But Chris Daly, the supervisor who came up with the idea, is forging ahead and plans to introduce the measure at the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday. So far, he has no co-sponsors, but that's because he has just started shopping the idea around.

"To me, it's a consumer issue in a city that leads the nation on the side of more sunshine and openness in government,'' said Daly, who represents the Civic Center, South of Market and the Tenderloin.

Daly, whose district is filled with tiny ethnic restaurants as well as some culinary powerhouses like Jardiniere, said he wasn't prompted by any personal food-poisoning experiences. He saw the grade cards working in Los Angeles during a visit there and wants to copy it.

As it stands, finding a health report and actually understanding it is difficult for the average diner. For example, San Francisco's 24 health inspectors give no scores or grades to restaurants -- they only list potential health problems in longhand on a report form.

And although state law requires that those reports be available on request and online, many restaurants don't have them readily on hand. (See story at right.) On the Internet, only summaries of the health inspections are available, and a consumer has to have the know-how and patience to wade through the Department of Public Health Web site to view them.

"Maybe we can improve the Web site,'' Newsom said.

Like in Los Angeles County, which adopted grades after a television news expose on kitchen grime churned stomachs, the San Francisco law would require that restaurants, bars and other food establishments that receive less than a C be called to a hearing and be subject to closure.

Los Angeles grades restaurants, bars, markets and every other place serving food and drinks. San Diego and Riverside counties also use report cards. In the Bay Area, San Mateo County considered them, but opted instead to post full health inspections on the county Web site.

Daly's argument for grades leans heavily on a Stanford report that says that the Los Angeles grade cards led to drops in emergency room visits for food poisoning and boosted restaurant business.

"The fact that you get health improvements means there is some real benefit going on,'' said Phillip Leslie, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and co-author of the 2003 study on Los Angeles' system. "We show in our paper a 20 percent decrease in people being admitted to hospitals for a food-related illness.

"I honestly don't understand why restaurants object to this,'' Leslie said. "If you get an A, your revenue goes up by 6 percent.''

When the program started in Los Angeles, 58 percent of restaurants received A's. Last year, 83 percent received A's, said Terrance Powell, Los Angeles County's chief environmental health specialist.

"I think that speaks to the industry. Even though they (restaurants) don't like this, they stepped up,'' Powell said.

But San Francisco restaurant owner Kevin Westlye, a member of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association board and a co-owner of the Franciscan restaurant in Fisherman's Wharf, said the city's restaurant industry already works hard at educating workers about sanitation. Calling the grade cards punitive, Westlye said, "In this city, if a restaurant gets one bad report card one time, it can put them out of business.''

Restaurateurs fear that the grades will give consumers only a snapshot in time, showing one day in the life of a restaurant -- the day the health inspector visited.

"I don't think it's educating the public. Grading provides a false alarm or a false comfort level,'' said Patricia Breslin, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which represents about 600 dining establishments and is a strong lobbying force at City Hall. The association regularly contributes to political campaigns and has supported Newsom. The association regularly runs public service campaigns on 20 to 40 billboards throughout the city. Newsom's "Care Not Cash" homeless proposal was one of those campaigns.

San Francisco's restaurants and bars did about $4.4 billion in direct sales and $5.7 billion of indirect sales in 2002, according to the association, which said these businesses directly or indirectly support about 63,000 jobs.

Even Powell in Los Angeles said restaurant grades are a tough sell, largely because of industry pressure on politicians.

"We've had every major metropolis check in with us,'' Powell said. "Many have walked away with elements of our program, but none have walked away with the whole program.''

While San Francisco's top environmental health officials declined to give their opinions of Daly's proposal, two inspectors who took a Chronicle reporter along for a day of inspections both said they didn't think the system would necessarily make restaurants safer for the public.

"Things can change literally in an instant," said Richard Kaihara, whose beat includes the Marina. "A restaurant could be an A, but one small thing can send it down the scale. The next day, it could be back in top form."

In Los Angeles, Powell said he can't swallow the "snapshot in time" argument. An owner can protest a grade within three days and request a new inspection within 10 days. An inspector also will conduct another surprise inspection in one or two months.

Before the Board of Supervisors can vote on Daly's proposal, there would be public hearings at the board level and likely by the Health Commission. The Department of Public Health would be in charge of converting the existing inspection reports into grades.

Twenty-four health inspectors watch over the 3,496 restaurants and fast- food places, 388 bars, a couple hundred cafeterias in schools, hospitals and nursing homes, and all the sports concessions, popcorn counters, hot dog carts and grocery stores in the city. They even check 13 vending machines that serve food that is not completely prepackaged. And, in a random twist of bureaucracy, they inspect the city's massage parlors and coin-operated laundries.

Inspectors try to conduct surprise inspections at each restaurant on their beat every four months. Although restaurants can be shut down completely for a day or forever, no restaurant gets any sort of score or any fines.

Restaurateurs who don't comply have to go to what's informally called "food court" with the Department of Public Health. In extreme cases, inspectors will close restaurants, although the city closed just 18 last year, and most reopened.

Daly's two favorite restaurants reflect the spectrum of what inspectors are finding in the city. Valencia Pizza and Pasta in the Mission received excellent reports during the last two years, but Pakwan on 16th Street has an extensive file that includes evidence of rodent and pigeon infestations in 2002. Pakwan's reports from 2003 show things have been cleaned up.