Do Food Carts Get Inspected?

Do food carts get inspected? It seems like they’re parked in the worst neighborhoods with environmental challenges all around them. —Karl B.

Are you sure those are food carts, Karl? Perhaps you’re confusing “food cart pods,” which tend to cluster on fashionable streets like Southeast Hawthorne, with the superficially similar “meth cart pods” often found in more out-of-the-way locales like Marine Drive or Southeast 105th and Knapp. (Pro tip: If you see more than three blue tarps, don’t walk up and order a burrito.)

While inspection requirements for these latter establishments have yet to be codified, real food carts get the same twice-a-year health inspections that brick-and-mortar restaurants do, and play by broadly the same rules. (Operators of the sites where food carts congregate recently became subject to their own separate set of regulations, as reported in WW last year.) Like their rooted cousins, carts are expected to keep food at the appropriate temperature, disinfect the surfaces upon which it’s prepared, throw it away when it expires, etc.

The few substantive differences between the two regimes largely have to do with plumbing. Stationary restaurants, obviously, are required to have running water, a generous supply of restrooms and handwashing sinks, and the standard three-stage dishwashing setup. Food carts, for equally obvious reasons, are allowed to keep their freshwater and graywater in tanks, can skate by with a leaner allotment of handwashing stations, and are permitted to wash their dishes off-site if necessary.

Given that many food carts haven’t moved in years, and that most of the health compromises associated with them have to do with the lack of conventional plumbing, you might suppose that some carts would spring for normal water and sewer hookups. But you’d be wrong! Under current regulations, plumbing a food cart is all but forbidden.

Sure, it’s not literally illegal. But a durable connection to water or sewer service gives your cart the legal status of a conventional restaurant, subject to all those regular-restaurant rules about fire exits, utility setbacks, sprinkler systems, and lots of other stuff that’s tough to install in a converted Volkswagen microbus.

It’s a bit of a conundrum: The regulatory apparatus is clearly bullish on the public health benefits of indoor plumbing, yet (for now, at least) that same apparatus is also telling a whole class of eateries they can’t have it. Will the rules ever change? Perhaps. For now, though, food cart operators will have to be satisfied with plumbing the depths of bureaucratic irony.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.