On cockroaches in restaurants
In pre-COVID days I was eating a salad at a diner on 14th Street in Manhattan. At the exact moment the waiter came to refill my water, a cockroach darted across the floor. We both saw it, but, in a kind of gentleman's agreement, decided not to speak of it. I finished my salad and left a 20% tip.
When COVID ends, can I go back to the diner? Or is the cockroach a "canary in the coal mine" situation? Would you go back?
First: I think you handled the whole situation diplomatically. Please pass my compliments along to your mom or whoever taught you manners. Second, who orders salad at a diner? Weird.
Anyway, a cockroach apologist might look at your question and say “Hey, it’s NYC, cockroaches are unavoidable. Man up.”
This is false. I live in a filthy downtown NYC tenement building. It’s a good day when there’s only one puddle of urine in the elevator. Last week I saw a guy using a hammer to de-shell a bucket of conches on the hallway floor. Most of my neighbors have mice and cockroaches. I have no vermin in my palatial 315-square-foot unit for two reasons:
Like a TV cop working a murder case, the first thing I did upon arrival was seal the perimeter. On moving day I scoured the place for crevices and holes, filling in a section between the wall and floor with caulking and sealing up a few gaps around pipes in the kitchen. If you have cockroaches (or mice) in your apartment, you should do this too.
I keep the space clean. Like, 1940s-housewife-on-Dexedrine clean. Even the darkest corners.
Pest control is purely a sanitation issue. If your space is free of food debris and standing water, there’s no reason for cockroaches to be there. In this way, your cockroach was a canary in the coal mine: it meant there was something in that diner that badly needed cleaning or sealing. Could have been something as mundane as a leaky dishwasher. More likely, it was an accumulation of kitchen filth that had gone unnoticed for decades— the oil-splattered backstop behind the grill, for example, or the grime-laden underside of a prep table.
Is it reasonable to judge a restaurant because they have cockroaches? Yeah, because —and I hope I’ve made this clear— cockroaches are 100% preventable. Cockroaches mean the restaurant is not doing a good job of cleaning their space.
Does this translate to unsafe food? Not necessarily, but it isn’t a fantastic sign. Should you go back to the diner? If it were me... that would depend on how good the food is.
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