"I was criticized for our policy but my restaurant never had a food safety issue or safety violation."

Oh, look. Consumer protection, at the customer level, provided by diligence of inspection and fodd handling procedure.

Where have I seen that before? Why, right here, as I have noted the real value of same in keeping you, dear reader, from being poisoned.

It's why you actually have the expectation that the can you open in the kitchen won't kill your family.

Radwaste, your argument, every time, is for state control -- the state telling us what we can or cannot choose to eat or drink. The state prohibiting us from visiting businesses that are not "licensed."
The state telling me that I cannot go by my own wish to buy unpasteurized cheese from a farmer who wishes to sell it to me.

This is entirely different. It is a businessperson determining that there's risk and not allowing food to be brought in. That's perfectly fine by me.

Btw, cakes and cookies are one of the few food products that you are allowed to prepare at home. I assume that is because they are pretty safe and not likely to cause food poisoning if left out at room temperature.

Make a decision based on something, re-visit that decision after complaints, make changes if needed and move on.

(Sounds like a good opportunity to have the customer pay for everyone to stand around singing Happy Birthday.)

Talking about it endlessly must be a big-city thing.

(Unless of course it's a GAY cake. Then we must bow down to the alter of something, not sure what.)

"Radwaste, your argument, every time, is for state control -- the state telling us what we can or cannot choose to eat or drink. The state prohibiting us from visiting businesses that are not "licensed.""

Apparently, you have never seen a single episode of "Bar Rescue"...

A desire to be the best at what you do produces a great business - but that's not what standards, regulations and penalties are for!

I am amazed, once again, that you have such selective memory of this - and a fundamental desire to ignore the plain constraints of society.

Meanwhile, let us revisit that quote:
"I was criticized for our policy but my restaurant never had a food safety issue or safety violation." This is diligence on the part of an owner taking practical measures to protect her customers - for the part of the process within her establishment. Guess what the restaurant owner counts on to provide safe raw materials?

Again and again, I have cited the usefulness of instruction and inspection standards in commercial industry (don't forget my example of Happy Cow Creamery when it was falsely claimed that raw milk couldn't be marketed). This industry not only operates across state lines in the majority of instances, the only mechanism by which a person may recover damages in the event of injury or fatality is through the courts, which must have objective measurements to determine fault.

Instead, it appears you want to engage in feel-good justice. Sorry. Not enough.

Have you noticed that the courts rarely reach into the home on issues like these? If you are not engaged in a business, you can serve week-old tapioca to anyone you please. The neighbors won't call CPS until your kids are hospitalized, and maybe not then. You can feed Aida and your neighbors' dog Chinese dog food to your heart's content, so long as you don't sell it - which signals your need for cash exceeds your charity, a reasonable trigger for oversight.

At any rate, I would love to see your idea of how to not only punish the restaurant that kills you but see to it that other restaurants don't kill others. Apparently, you just want to count on their desire to see repeat business. Everything will be fine, right?

Of course not - and this brings me to repeat what I must, for you have not noticed this: Safety is provided by prevention, not action after the fact. Allowing someone to be injured or killed in commercial practices shouldn't be acceptable.

Industry standards have produced your expectation of good service. The carrot-and-stick of good practices and penalties for placing the public at risk has actually provided this environment.

Got asbestos? Lead? Mercury? Botulinum? Sulfur Dioxide? You can't tell, and you ALSO can't tell if some sleazy or careless person will bring you those things in the future. You must count on other agencies to see that someone's desire for immediate profit doesn't supersede their concern for your well-being.

To insist that standards be dropped is just insane - and "dropped" is the only alternative to supervision at the state level.

Meanwhile, take a deep breath. The ONLY reason you can, right there where you love to live today, is the policing of the California Air Resources Board. Oh, yeah, car builders wouldn't make smog, it'd be bad for business...

The biggest problem as I see it, is bacteria are never eliminated from the environment. Unless you want to nuke every food item in existence.

If you do that the health consequences of *no *bacteria are just as severe as the *wrong* bacteria in your system.

Humans are basically bags of bacteria, and there usually isn't a problem, unless the good bacteria which digests your food becomes overwhelmed by the bad bacteria(something your body hasn't adapted too.

A lot of sickness acquired from restaurants is highly contagious noroviruses, or hepatitis and not bacterial at all.

This is something the government pretends to control with their food safety regulations, but the truth is, food safety is as big a Kabuki as the TSA.

I'm surprised cakeage fees are controversial. It seems like normal and reasonable business behavior. As was pointed out if you want to bring your wine and drink it in someone's establishment they charge a fee. This is no different. If the fees are excessive then shop somewhere else. It's not like restaurateurs are kidnapping people off the street and forcing them to eat there.

I will say taking pictures and making fun of people is poor behavior.

I'm surprised cakeage fees are controversial. It seems like normal and reasonable business behavior.

Sure, it's why your local clothing store doesn't offer free alterations of clothing you bought elsewhere. They're in the business of selling clothing, not of offering free alterations.

If the restaurant sells dessert and you bring your own, that cuts into their business. They're not in the business of providing free rooms for gatherings and free wait services. They're in business to sell prepared food with wait services. The people working there depend upon those sales for their livings.

People justifying this behavior complain that restaurants' cakes are expensive. Right.

If a restaurant has cakes that are expensive, chances are that it's a fancy-schmancy place, where everything is expensive. Seems very odd to me that people would choose to dine at what they surely must know is an expensive restaurant and then complain that some food (or beverage) items on the menu are expensive.

If you're willing to spend money at an f-s place, then suck it up and pay their prices for a cake (or wine or whatever) if that's what you want to order. Or, ask if you can bring your own wine/cake/whatever and don't bitch when you're charged a perfectly reasonable fee for doing so.

Bringing your own wine, I get. The wine list at the restaurant is usually limited by what the distributor has in stock and the markup is huge. It's still a bit of an insult to the restaurant's ability to select wine that goes well with their food.

However, the restaurant doesn't use its own skills and expertise to make the wine (if they have a sommelier, some expertise of the restaurant is included in the offering). The restaurant makes food. If you bring your own wine, gladly pay the corkage fee. No complaints.

Cake, on the other hand, is made by the restaurant. Eating food prepared by the restaurant is the purpose of going to a restaurant, especially one at which the name of the chef is provided.

Even if it's Aunt Mildred's special rum cake, it's kind of an insult to the restaurant. It says, "your cake isn't good enough."

...chef Steven Satterfield, takes things a step further. His private Instagram account is filled with photographs of cakes customers have carried into Miller Union. He pokes fun at grocery store monstrosities and cakes fashioned from chocolate chip cookie dough, cracking wise about garish icing and other questionable decorative choices.

That's kind of a jerk-move. Let's make fun of the rubes who don't have enough class to prefer our fine cake over their own "hideous" choices.

I'll avoid Miller Union that next time I'm in Atlanta.

Radwaste: At any rate, I would love to see your idea of how to not only punish the restaurant that kills you but see to it that other restaurants don't kill others. Apparently, you just want to count on their desire to see repeat business. Everything will be fine, right? . . . Safety is provided by prevention, not action after the fact. Allowing someone to be injured or killed in commercial practices shouldn't be acceptable. . . . You must count on other agencies to see that someone's desire for immediate profit doesn't supersede their concern for your well-being.

I used to be on a message board with a guy who was a libertarian. He was adamant that we don't need health and safety standards and regulation because, in his view, businesses would make sure they didn't do anything to harm consumers or employees. He was certain they would do this out of self-interest. He was certain that their interest in avoiding potentially-ruinous lawsuits would supersede their desire for profit (a nice fantasy, the rest of us thought.) Furthermore -- and perhaps most importantly -- he felt that even if consumers or employees were killed or injured, this was a reasonable price to pay for liberating businesses from the onerous yoke of governmental health and safety regulations.

JD, I have no objection to health and safety regulations. I just think they should be imposed at the local and state level, where the officials are responsive to the voters.
They also need to be directed at real threats. Tainted food isn't much of a problem in this country. Nor is bacteria in food items.

However, the hand wringing FDA bureaucrats in DC have saved very few people, if any at all, and have done it at the great expense to the taxpayers with the side benefit of empire building and providing political patronage jobs to a bunch or really poorly educated college grads, who have no skills, but lots of political connections.

JD, I have no objection to health and safety regulations. I just think they should be imposed at the local and state level, where the officials are responsive to the voters.

Isab, if you had to guess, what percentage of libertarians would you say agree with the libertarian I referred to? (Since you don't have any objection to those regulations, as long as they aren't imposed at the federal level, he would probably not consider you to be a "true" libertarian...at least in that regard.)

Here's an article I just came acrosss: The Libertarian Delusion. In it, the author writes:

...regulation is more popular than many politicians think. It is unpopular in the abstract, but citizens count heavily on government regulation to protect against everything from polluted air, to unsafe food and drugs, to dangerous conditions at work. Nonetheless, the anti-regulators are on the march. Republicans are promoting a general regulatory rollback. Lipsky quotes the libertarian Cato Institute website: “There is no greater impediment to American prosperity than the immense body of regulations chronicled in the Federal Register.” Of course, nearly all of these regulations are there because of some market failure or corporate abuse that resulted in citizen pressure on Congress for reform.

Now, being opposed to the "immense body of regulations chronicled in the Federal Register" doesn't mean you're opposed to all regulations, or even all health & safety regulations, so the Cato Institute may not agree with the view of my libertarian friend. On the other hand, they may. I don't know.

I do agree with the author's final sentence in that excerpt.

@"Because you're one of, like, six people in the population with celiac disease, or -- more likely -- because you long for attention"

Small side point, but there is scientific evidence that NONceliac gluten sensitivity is something real (even though it's not fully understood):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25701700

(There was a widely publicized study which supposedly found nonceliac gluten sensitivity to be fake, and which received wide press coverage around 2014 - the above is a more recent study and long story short but the earlier study was probably flawed.)

My insurance company strongly recommended that no food be brought into the establishment.
____________________________________

I know what Lois meant, of course, but I thought that was funny.

It reminds me of what Fran Lebowitz said about the inconveniences of eating in public:

"I would really prefer to eat at home, except there's no food there."

Well done Amy! I love your style. And I ask myself the same question all the time; since when is everybody such a special snowflake that everything has go be 'perfect' as judged by them?

Talk about a First World Problem! Get a life people and realise just how incredibly privileged you are just to be even thinking like this. Millions of people don't have enough to eat at all and I bet you don't hear them bitching about extra restaurant charges.

Sorry, 'flawed' is the wrong word there. Here's a bit more info on the murkiness surrounding the gluten issue: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201410/is-gluten-causing-your-depression

Conan,

There can be perfectly valid reasons to bring in your own cake. When I got married we had the reception at a restaurant we really liked. We brought in our own wedding cake even though the restaurant offered to make one. We also brought in some wine we preferred to theirs. For both of these we paid a fee to have it served. Which I consider quite reasonable.

There can be perfectly valid reasons to bring in your own cake. [...] For both of these we paid a fee to have it served. Which I consider quite reasonable. ~ Posted by: Ben at January 18, 2016 1:52 PM

I agree, paying the fee when you bring your own is quite reasonable.

As for bringing your own cake, I can see doing that for a wedding reception. Typically, one does not use the dessert menu at the reception venue, even if there is one. One has a baker prepare the cake (as cutting the cake is usually an event unto itself, separate from the other activities of a wedding reception). As a wedding cake can be an involved endeavor, with tiers and curlycues, that makes sense to let the caterer/chef concentrate on the meal and the baker on the cake.

At our wedding, my wife and I used the baker recommended by the place at which we were having the reception. They were used to working with each other and the reception venue didn't have a pastry chef; nor the capacity to work on both a wedding cake and a meal.

"Isab, if you had to guess, what percentage of libertarians would you say agree with the libertarian I referred to? (Since you don't have any objection to those regulations, as long as they aren't imposed at the federal level, he would probably not consider you to be a "true" libertarian...at least in that regard.)"

Don't really care. This isn't a high school debate.

I don't have to meet either your definition or his of a *true* libertarian anymore than I need to convince the Southern baptists that I meet their definition of a true Christian.

I think a lot of libertarians are just as deluded and naive about the real world, as the Democrats, Socialists, and the Republicans are.

I'm a small government small *r* republican, who believes the federal government has gotten way too large, and is trampling both on the states, and on the individual citizens in pursuit of some unattainable *public safety * rationale.

Every time I Hear "even if it would only save one child". It makes me want to puke.

These statistical illiterates have no idea what they are asking for, and what it would take in terms of resources and loss of personal and Constitutional freedoms to achieve it.

I think a lot of libertarians are just as deluded and naive about the real world, as the Democrats, Socialists, and the Republicans are.

I have no disagreement with you there.

He signs his NYT comment "Mr McMiller"? Normal people just sign their first and last name. This cry for respectability, added to his practice of ridiculing his customers for a practice he allows and charges extra for, speaks volumes about the hapless lad. What a piece of work.

Prof. Dr. Sutton

I meant "Mr McCarthy", of course. Doesn't change the substance of my comment.

Bringing a cake has been going on as long as I can remember. There was a short period when I was about 10 where the cool thing was for your parents to have your birthday in the banquet room at this once fancy restaurant .... usually the parents brought in cake, but to be the coolest you got a cake through the restaurant. Personally, I hated the place and as a kid thought the food was horrible (I suspect it would be OK for my tastes now). Sadly, I was never invited to party there.

After reading this I went to my favorite restaurant as I often times do on Monday. So meal and (non-alcoholic) drink came to $9.97 before tip. A slice of cake on the menu is $9.95. A more typical meal would be the house steak (includes potato and vegetable) which just recently went up to $10.95 (from 9.95). The cake prices seems ridicules and it is nothing special. I asked the bartender and she said she didn't think they were setup to legally allow food to be brought in like that but at a place she worked at before they had a "party" fee for such things.

Years ago (at least 10) I discussed corkage fees with some friends, one was a restaurant manager. My friends restaurant didn't allow it - and didn't offer much in the way of wines. The reason it came up was in the news a place had started charging $50 corkage - which I was told was more than all but a few bottles the restaurant had. That seemed unreasonable to me. I thought another places policy seemed reasonable - $1 for the bottle plus $1 for each glass (e.g. a table of 4 would be $5).

I think many places mark stuff up too much - an unreasonable amount. At just a neighbor bar I was charged the same for a bottle as a six pack went for at the grocery store when it wasn't on sale....and it was on sale at the time so the six pack was $1.50 cheaper. I realize now to only buy stuff on tap at that place.

Yes a $50 corkage fee is high. But I know of a place that charges the same for a simple steak. As long as they don't hide the fee and are up front about the cost you have the choice to dine elsewhere. (Medical industry that was aimed at you, jackasses.)

For our anniversary (on Halloween) my husband and I had a theme cake. We asked the restaurant if we could bring it. They said yes, and even kept it in the kitchen until dessert time. I can't remember if they helped plate it or not.

If that wanted to charge me, I would have been fine with it.

Great time was had by all.

I guess I'm just a redneck hick from Alabama and I'm not up on the latest trends. But maybe except for some special event (for which I'd make arrangements in advance), it would never occur to me to bring my own cake to a restaurant. The whole point of a restaurant is that I'm paying them to prepare and serve food because I don't feel like doing it myself. Why am I going to a restaurant if I have to bring my own food? What am I missing here?

Why am I going to a restaurant if I have to bring my own food? What am I missing here? ~ Posted by: Cousin Dave at January 19, 2016 1:25 PM

It's a pizza place where you make your own pie!

I guess I'm just a redneck hick from Alabama and I'm not up on the latest trends. But maybe except for some special event"

Redneck hicks are some of my best friends. To a man, they are charming, kind, and have manners,

I expect this is a New York thing CD. There you can stop off at a nice bakery as you walk to a nice restaurant. Pretty much anywhere else in the US the concept is absurd.

Ben, not necessarily.

I remember going to a somewhat fancy, Spanish restaurant in MA for my mother's birthday (we'd lived in Spain for a few years). Needless to say, we knew that our favorite style of birthday cake was simply not going to be on the menu, so we brought it with us. There was no charge, to my knowledge. (Annoyingly, all too often, any iced cake where the icing is NOT made with butter - or powdered sugar - is not something you'll find at a restaurant. Not to mention that baking cakes, as I recall, is really not something that's done very much in Spanish cuisine.)

Ok Lenona, a north-eastern thing. Cousin Dave, Conan, and JD expressed incredulity at the idea. I can say from personal experience this doesn't significantly happen in the fly over states. If you are bringing a cake you are probably renting out the entire restaurant so a cakeage fee is the least of your concerns. Having a customer bring a cake and eat it in a normal restaurant setting I can't see happening more than once every couple of years. Hardly enough to keep a snarky blog going.