Mouse Foie Gras And Terrine Of Flies

What do Bouley and Danny & Pepper’s Jerk Chicken Express have in common? They both failed their health inspection this past year:

The number of city eateries that flunked food inspections jumped 17 percent over the past year — with some famous and highly rated Big Apple restaurants landing on the dreaded dirty list, The Post has learned.

About one in six of the 27,158 restaurants, bars and park vendors — including such notables as the top Zagat-rated French eatery Bouley in TriBeCa and the legendary Sylvia’s in Harlem — failed the hygiene test, according to inspections conducted by city Department of Health workers.

The eateries were slapped with a total of $17.3 million in fines.

The number of initial food inspections increased by 11 percent, as more new eateries opened. Even so, the rise in failures exceeded the rise in inspections.

The worst eatery in the city, according to the health-inspection rules, is Danny & Pepper’s Jerk Chicken Express on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, which accumulated 20 infractions totaling 193 points.

Establishments with violations totaling 28 or more points fail their inspections and require re-inspection.

Inspectors found rats, mice and flies feasted at Danny & Pepper’s. And violations were issued for dirty restrooms and failing to monitor temperatures of “potentially hazardous food.”

Months Ending In “R”

There are bad oysters going around:

Seventy-four people are believed to have gotten sick from eating raw oysters from the Pacific Northwest that were sold in New York City restaurants and stores last month, city and federal officials say.

Outbreaks have also been reported in British Columbia, Oregon and Washington State, which alone has recorded at least 100 cases, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Both the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Food and Drug Administration have warned people not to eat the oysters, which are infected with naturally occurring bacteria that are most prevalent in the summer, when water temperature rises.

In recent months, the F.D.A. said, there has been “an unusual increase in bacterial illness associated with eating raw oysters” from waters of the lower Puget Sound in Washington. Washington State issued a recall of the oysters last week.

A spokesman for the agency said the outbreak, caused by the bacteria virbrio parahaemolyticus, was probably the result of the higher than usual air temperatures on the West Coast.

In healthy people, the symptoms — which include diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, fever and chills — usually do not last more than three days.

Humberto Humberto, It’s Not The Rooster’s Fault It Has A Thing For Pigeons

Moral of the story — never trust anyone with a pet rooster:

A Manhattan man was arrested yesterday after he killed his pet rooster by biting its head off because he was angry at the bird, authorities said.

Humberto Rodriguez, 52, was charged with animal cruelty after agents from the ASPCA found his pet’s headless body on the fire escape of his apartment at 506 W. 213th St. in Inwood.

When the agents got there, they noticed a large crowd around the fire escape — pointing up to the headless bird, authorities said.

Rodriguez confessed to having champed down on the 6-pound rooster because it had attacked one of his pet baby pigeons.

He said he became enraged and sought to discipline the foul bird.

Responders found the body of the rooster on his fire escape, ASPCA spokesman Joe Pentangelo said.

The rooster’s head has not been located.

Authorities also discovered that the rooster had been a victim of previous domestic abuse:

An examination also found that the rooster, which Rodriguez owned for six months, suffered from two broken wings, Pentangelo said.

Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

The good thing about locating cables underground is that the city is largely immune to power outages during severe weather. The bad thing about locating cables underground is that it becomes difficult to figure out where the problem is once something goes wrong:

Consolidated Edison reported major progress yesterday in the week-old struggle to restore power to western Queens, but thousands faced a new workweek without electricity and frustrations boiled over as some officials called for a declaration of emergency and the resignation of the utility’s chief executive.

Kevin Burke, Con Ed’s chairman and chief executive, said at a 4 p.m. briefing that utility crews had restored power to nearly 16,000 of the approximately 25,000 customers affected by the blackout. In human terms, that meant that the lights, elevators, refrigerators and air-conditioners were back on for an estimated 64,000 of the 100,000 people who had suffered through the ordeal.

In an update last night, Chris Olert, a spokesman for the utility, said that by 5:45 p.m., service had been restored to more than 19,800 customers. That amounts to about 79,200 people, using a layman’s rule of thumb that counts four people for every “customer,” which could be a single home or an entire apartment building.

At a news conference at Con Edison’s headquarters in Manhattan, his second briefing of the weekend after five days of public silence, Mr. Burke said that Con Edison crews were working around the clock “street by street, manhole by manhole, to get all the customers back in service.”

The dwindling numbers suggested that the end might soon be in sight, but Con Edison has come under a barrage of criticism as having grossly underestimated the extent of the blackout, especially in the first few days.

Mr. Burke insisted that he could still provide no estimate of when full power might be restored to eight square miles of Astoria, Long Island City, Woodside, Sunnyside, Hunters Point and other sections. Underground cables had burned out in those areas, apparently overloaded by the utility’s decision to keep the power flowing to most of the 400,000 residents of western Queens despite the loss of 10 major feeder cables that power the area.

That decision meant that all of the area’s power was running through only 12 feeder cables, and through transformers and secondary cables that were not designed to take such a heavy load.

Mr. Burke said he had no explanation for why the 10 major cables went down while Con Edison’s 56 other feeder cable networks continued to work. The root cause of the blackout, one of the city’s most prolonged in decades, is under investigation by the utility itself and by the Queens district attorney’s office, the City Council and the state’s Public Service Commission.

See also: It’s More Or Less 2,000.

The Thing About Electricity Is That It’s Really, Really, Really Important

Portions of Queens are heading into a fifth day without power — ironic when the neighborhoods affected are within walking distance of several major power plants:

Some residents of the affected areas complained that the city has ignored a prolonged blackout that affected several neighborhoods in western Queens, which happens to be where most of the city’s power plants are located.

. . .

Nowhere was the “so close, yet so far” sentiment more pronounced as at the Yellowbird Repair Shop, directly across 20th Avenue from the Charles Poletti Power Plant in Astoria. Despite its proximity to the plant’s electric turbines, the repair shop, like thousands of homes and businesses in western Queens, remained largely without power yesterday.

“All they have to do is run an extension cord out to us and we’re open for business,” said Chris Kalatzis, the shop manager, adding that his house in Astoria was also without power, ruining $200 worth of food in his refrigerator.

. . .

In Queens, the system began to fail on Monday, the third day of a severe heat wave, and the failures were probably worsened by thunderstorms on Tuesday night.

In parts of Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside and other areas, there was substantial loss of food, loss of business and loss of cool. “Even third-world countries do not have this kind of problem,” said Jimmy Istavrof, 57, who owns the J & T Greek and Italian Deli on Ditmars Boulevard. “All this from a couple of 90-degree days.”

He showed how his Greek desserts and other foods sat spoiling in his freezers.

“You see? Like soup,” he said, squeezing a soft carton of ice cream. “It’s all going to shame.”

Dude, throw that stuff away!