Stab At The Heart

By Bogus Doug

One of the best restaurants in the city of Saint Paul is Heartland. That’s a true statement by popular and critical affirmation as well as from personal experience. Heartland’s chef-owner, Lenny Russo, writes one of the “community voice” blogs at the Star Tribune website, via which he delivered a bombshell today:

Heartland to St. Paul: “So long. It was great while it lasted.”

Another victim of the wretched economy, you might think. Just another casualty in the cut-throat restaurant industry which has seen so many closings already this year, perhaps you assume.

But that’s not the story here. Heartland is doing fine. Saint Paul, however, might be broken.

It seems there is a new Saint Paul city ordinance being proposed by Ward 1 council member Melvin Carter III. The ordinance is characterized by Mr. Russo thusly:

[The ordinance] require[s] every business located within the boundaries of the municipality that serves any sort of prepared food to have on hand at all times an allergen handbook listing every ingredient in every item served. Not only must this handbook be updated to reflect any changes to the items being offered for sale, but it must also be available for viewing by anyone who desires to do so regardless of the fact that the handbook likely contains proprietary information that any competitor may access at his or her own discretion.

Being a parent of children with severe food allergies, I am certainly sympathetic to the motivation of the proposed ordinance. It can be truly frightening when your child begins having an unexpected food allergy reaction. We have allergy kits for two of our three children for this very reason, but you never want to depend on that alone. As soon as your child begins to have an allergic reaction a parent’s mind instantly fills with visions of anaphylactic shock and the possibility that your measly first-aid remedies won’t be enough this time. The desire to keep your child safe from such potentially life threatening experiences is entirely natural.

The question here is not whether it’s a good idea to make food allergy information available. All things being equal, of course it is. But all things are not equal. The way one answers basic questions of who bears the burden of risk for an allergy and how much effort food sellers should be required to undergo in the name of preventing accidental allergen reaction can be the difference between a viable business community and a regulatory hell from which business flees. If you think that’s even remotely an exaggeration of the case, take a look at Mr. Russo’s assessment of this new regulation on his restaurant (all emphases below mine).

As many people well know, our restaurant changes its menu on a daily basis due to the fact that we purchase locally produced ingredients that are sourced from small, family farms that practice sustainable agriculture. In addition, all of our menu items are produced from scratch utilizing whole foods.

In analyzing the operational impact of this ordinance, I did an approximation of how many recipes are employed on a daily basis in order to produce our menu. I found that number to be in the range of 120 recipes and sub-recipes on any given day. If I created an allergen handbook as required by the proposed ordinance, my entire day would be devoted to writing recipes and ingredient lists. That would leave no time for managing my business let alone actual cooking. Since the menu changes daily, such an exercise would have to be repeated each day and might have to be repeated more than once in the same day if we were to run out of a certain item and insert a new item as a substitution. Not only is this impractical; it is virtually untenable

Furthermore, such an allergen handbook would contain all of our proprietary information which would be available to anyone upon request. This would put us at a distinct competitive disadvantage and would damage our ability to remain a unique and successful restaurant enterprise.

Given all of that, we would no longer be able to operate Heartland in its present form within the city limits of St. Paul.

Russo is far from a cut-throat capitalist running the culinary equivalent of an unregulated sweat shop. He makes every effort to support his community in letter and spirit. His restaurant provides the kind of service to patrons and the overall community which ought to be considered a model for others. Instead the heavy hand of a government all too typically ignorant of the unintended consequences of enacting nobly intended regulations threatens to drive him out of town.

Go ahead and read all of Russo’s fairly long post. Along with other long-established Saint Paul restaurant owners he’s been trying his best to bring the devastating impact of this potential ordinance to the attention of Saint Paul’s lawmakers. All that’s managed to gain is a further month of review before a vote. But Russo, like most business owners, can’t wait until the last minute to find out what the city council intends to do to him. He’s now planning to move his restaurant to Minneapolis, a city hardly known to be lax in its own regulatory climate which ought to show you just how out-of-control Saint Paul’s government is becoming.

Russo’s post closes with a statement that may serve as the epitaph for Saint Paul’s small business community at large:

So, so long St. Paul. It was great while it lasted.

It was great for Saint Paul’s citizens as well. One wonders how much more of this they will tolerate before deciding that maybe defacto one-party rule of the city isn’t quite as fun as they thought it would be. It’s certainly making Saint Paul a poorer place.

Source: Shot in the Dark http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=5315

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