Last week we were aghast at how the New York Times and Big Soda combined to heap outrage on the Health Department's photoshopped ad campaign against diabetes. You'd have thought Mayor Bloomberg personally fed this actor into the woodchipper! Now, the Times has spoken with the man who posed for the picture, Cleo Berry, who was apparently "stunned" when he saw his image in the ad for the first time on Friday. "I was beyond shocked. I cried at my computer screen for, like, a minute." More than the crocodile tears he shed for this sandwich ad in which he gets viciously beaten? That is what happened, isn't it? more ›

Everyone's favorite Disneyland-on-acid-esque congee emporium, Congee Village (the one on Bowery, not Allen Street), has been shuttered by the Health Department after racking up 55 violation points on a recent visit, reports The Lo-Down. more ›

Restaurateurs, the City Council feels your pain. Though the Department of Health's restaurant letter grade program has proved popular among consumers, many restaurateurs are still not loving it. Some are even taking pains to skirt DOH inspections. But don't worry, 2013 election-ready Speaker Christine Quinn and her Council hears the cry of the common cook and is doing something about it! Why, they've even set up an online survey! more ›

Nanny Bloomberg's Department of Health is letting itself go this term! Just three years ago they were terrifying New Yorkers with soda that turned into human fat in the air and now they are resorting to fat chicks on scooters and expanding hamburger line graphs. Even compared the department's recent "casual smoking will KILL you" campaign this one seems lackluster. Still, they got us to talk about them? more ›

Restaurateurs aren't exactly big fans of the Department of Health (see: the guy who got big fines, he says, for photographing an inspector working) but the Daily News today notices an interesting way that some are getting out of the standard inspections entirely: Just claim to be a supermarket or a warehouse! more ›

According to a Manhattan restauranteur, a camera-shy health inspector fired off a litany of violations as soon as he began documenting the inspection. Bill Koulmentas, the owner of George's diner in Tribeca, tells the Post that because he pulled out his iPhone to document a visit from a DOH inspector yesterday, the inspector became angry and wrote him up for 65 points worth of violations, and shuttered the restaurant for the first time since September 11, 2001. "They can do anything they want, Koulmentas says. "Something's out of control here. It's lies, lies, lies." more ›

Smoking, Nanny Bloomberg likes to remind us, will kill you. But don't think that your "I only smoke bummed ciggies at parties" routine makes you safe. Oh, no. The Department of Health wants you to know YOU COULD STILL DIE. So they're launching a print and TV campaign to help "light smokers" become "nonsmokers." Because you don't want to die, do you? more ›

The rules for restaurants and bars, they are a changing. As the Times notes, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene today is set to approve a number of changes to Article 81 of the city's Health Code, the document that governs sanitation rules for food-service establishments (you can see the whole thing right here in this pdf). Finally, bartenders won't have to wear hair nets! Because, yeah, even if they so much as handled a lime they were supposed to. Now they tell us! more ›

Not too long ago the Department of Health paid of visit to the New Museum's Carsten Höller Experience exhibit, which features a sensory deprivation tank, called the "Psycho Tank." Upon their departure they told the museum the tank, which visitors float around in naked, could only have one person in it at time, but overall cleared the exhibit. Now a recent visitor is claiming she contracted an ear infection from the tank, as did her boyfriend. She tells us: more ›

[UPDATE BELOW] According to some people with Twitter accounts, Williamsburg's beloved Union Pool was shut down by the mean old Department of Health last night, a city agency that clearly can't appreciate life's more refined pleasures, like wine served in a cup and key bumps in a crowded bathroom. more ›

Over the past few months, the Health Department has put the kibosh on many a beloved Brooklyn food institution (see: Di Fara, Turkey's Nest), but now, the DOH has shuttered an actual Brooklyn institute—the City Tech cafeteria—for a slew of health code violations so egregious you may very well lose your lunch. more ›

Just months after her first fashion show, the city Department of Health & Mental Hygiene has sent Matilda the Algonquin cat into exile! The department has banished the cat from her lobby lounge, according to the NY Post, and she's now reduced to being on a leash behind the check-in desk, or lounges on a higher floor, away from where food and drinks are being served. A manager also told inspectors that they contained Matilda with an electronic fence. more ›

Old-school Theater District haunt Sardi's got slapped by the cold hand of the law last night, when the bar-snack hating Health Department visited and ordered the bar to stop offering their signature free communal cheese pots and bowls of pretzels and peanuts to guests. more ›

If you've wandered up Bedford Avenue lately in search of a cheap oversized margarita in a Styrofoam to-go cup, you've probably noticed, and been bitterly disappointed, that perennial dive-bar favorite Turkey's Nest Tavern has been shuttered since last week. It's a real blow to the neighborhood's legions of drunk McCarren park picnickers, and the cranky old men who stare at them. more ›

Mayor Bloomberg, who apparently harbors a dirty water habit himself, thinks the city's street food vendors should be subject to the same letter grading system as brick-and-mortar restaurants—but the Health Department isn't so sure. more ›

New York's restaurant letter grades have been around for a year now, most restaurants have been graded and a majority have gotten themselves A's. But along with the rise of letter grades (and the increase in fines for the city's coffers that have come with them) something else has been on the rise: attempted bribery. Yesterday the police arrested a restaurant owner in Queens for trying to pay off an inspector with $500. His was by no means the first such case this year. more ›

Last week, after a four-alarm fire shut down the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Harlem, the city dumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Hudson River. That dump ended on Friday night but the fallout continues. more ›

The epic saga of East Village dive Mars Bar finally appears to have come to an end, after a visit from the Department of Health and an overriding sense of ambivalence from the owner. more ›

For a quarter century, an elderly Bronx woman has been selling flavored ices out of her second story window on Tiebout Avenue. The locals put 50 cents in a metal bucket, which 81-year-old Providence Lamultt raises up to the window, then lowers back down again with her popular frozen treats inside. "You can't buy these at a store," one customer raves to the Daily News. "Gramma's ices are so unique. The coconut has real chunks of coconut!" Here's a charming video about her little operation: more ›

In a move that will no doubt frustrate passengers who are already tired of having their bodies exposed to radiation or their genitals groped, airport security is "expected to tighten" due to intelligence that terrorists are surgically implanting explosive devices inside their bodies. While White House spokesman Jay Carney stressed that this concept "is not at all surprising," and that the intelligence "did not relate to an imminent or specific threat," a source from the Department of Homeland security tells the Times that they have warned their foreign counterparts. If only there were some vague, Orwellian, color-coded system to get people scared about something like this... more ›

Russian billionaires and bleak buildings aren't the only things the Atlantic Yards project is bringing to Brooklyn: the construction is reportedly stirring up a large rat colony, some of which are "the size of cats." At a recent meeting to address the issue, two Downtown Brooklyn residents said that the rats got into their cars' engine blocks, "leaving behind chicken bones and aluminum foil, all the while chewing on the wires." One neighbor tells City Room, "We don't have a normal rat problem, we have a rat tsunami." more ›