“Ugh!” the students cry amid chuckles.

“You laugh, but it is serious,” Patino deadpans.

During his 14 years as a food-safety instructor, Patino has learned to keep his clients not only awake but also engaged. After all, food workers don’t take his class for their own enrichment, as they would, say, a course on feng shui or scrapbooking. Food-service establishments in Virginia, Maryland, and the District are required to have a certified professional food manager—“a person in charge,” as nearly all literature refers to the position—who makes sure food is handled in accordance with each jurisdiction’s code. In 2003, D.C. went one step further: A food manager is now required to be on the premises, with appropriate ID, at all times during an establishment’s hours of operation; failure to comply results in immediate closure and a possible $500 fine. This employee will have passed a test covering everything from cross-contamination to holding temperatures to pest control.

“Hay fever—forget it,” he adds. “Mucus is flowing....By the time you get the salad [done], it comes with its own dressing.”

The food inspector alighted on the Blimpie at 1101 14th St. NW at an inconvenient time for owner Dan Kim. His mother was unexpectedly hospitalized in Florida, and he flew down to be with her. The only other certified food manager had just quit on him, and a city sanitarian dropped by while Kim was away and found no certified food manager on duty. The establishment was closed until Kim returned and could present his ID to the health department.

“I tried to explain to [the inspector], and he didn’t understand,” says Kim.

According to Taylor, sanitarians use “a common-sense approach,” allowing a food manager’s brief absence—say, to run a 10-minute errand—to slide as long as no other gross infractions are found. “We are trying to be public-friendly,” he says, though he is quick to point out that this friendliness isn’t policy. “The letter of the law says they are supposed to be there, period.”

Because it is nearly impossible for one employee to be on the premises at all times, why not just get all employees certified, as the Carpenter’s Shelter does? Classes are relatively inexpensive—Patino’s costs $160, which includes a course manual, the $70 exam fee, and a thermometer.

But for small businesses where turnover is high and employees are flaky, certification costs can add up. Georgetown’s Griffin Market was recently caught without a food manager on duty after a certified worker quit without notice. The only other certified food manager, owner Paul Patel, was out picking up produce when a sanitarian dropped by. “If you have to get some, like, wholesale from the meat markets, then you have only one person to go,” says Ashish Patel, Paul’s brother, who helps out at the store. “One thing that they have to understand is that it’s a 14-hour business.” Patel points out that getting the license is a long process—it takes 21 days just to receive a test score, he says. “This type of small business cannot afford the expense” of certifying every employee, he says. “What’s the provision if a person quits on you?”

Such hassles feed Patino’s business. His Food Safety and Salud is a classic D.C. pursuit, a niche operation that thrives off of government regulation. And the need for services such as his is reaching farther and farther outside the Beltway, as bacterial disasters abound and food codes become stricter across the country. He plans to expand into New Jersey and Delaware soon; demand was so great when he started out that his fledgling company enjoyed a ready-made client base.

Patino does note that he has one new rival in the Latino community: his estranged wife Danely Patino. The two worked together for five years before getting separated; two months ago, she started her own bilingual certification outfit, Global Food Safety Training. Though his wife took the company’s McDonald’s business with her, Patino maintains that her company is small and doesn’t pose a threat.

Danely, who has a background teaching biology in her native Ecuador, has no doubt that she will be able to build a solid business. She plans to visit area eateries door-to-door to drum up customers. “Believe me, I know what I am doing,” she says. “I am a strong woman.”

There could be room for both of them. The Patinos seem to grasp where the industry is headed: into Little Vietnam, Little Mexico, Little Burma. Al Patino attributes the high rate of food-borne illness partly to the proliferation of foreigner-owned ethnic eateries. He points out that 76 million people get sick from food each year in the United States (a figure backed up on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Web site) and that it’ll get worse with “so many restaurants with so many nationalities.”

The polyglot culinary explosion also helps his classes because the States are constantly importing old-country habits, he says, such as leaving the kitchen door open and neglecting to, say, freeze fish for seven days at the required minus-4 degrees for seviche. Patino says that Peruvian people have a special problem understanding the latter regulation because fresh seviche is so prevalent in their homeland. “They say, ‘In my country, people don’t get sick,’?” he says. “I say, ‘This is not Peru; this is the United States.’?”

“The truth of cooking, whether you’re eating at someone’s home or in a restaurant, is that people are putting their hands in your food,” says Barry Koslow, chef de cuisine at Georgetown’s Mendocino Grille & Wine Bar.

A lot of different hands assemble the eats at Carpenter’s. The attendees admit that, because the bulk of the food is prepared by volunteers before it even enters the shelter, a lot of the class’s talking points are more useful on a personal level. “I am so known to take out frozen chicken, put it on the counter, and come back to it,” says case manager Katrina Tabb, who’s worked at the shelter about a year. “I didn’t know that was bad.” Patino has had a lot of success correcting such long-held notions; he claims his students have a 98 percent passing rate.

Ever-tightening sanitary regulations and increasing numbers of students hearing the gospel on food handling—that’s got to be good news for the average District diner, right?

Tough to say. The D.C. health department has no published data charting the number of reported food-borne illnesses since 2003. On a national level, a CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report dated April 2005 shows that food-borne illness caused by campylobacter, E. coli, listeria, and salmonella remained relatively steady between 2003 and 2004.

And the bureaucrats behind the ever-evolving food code are slow to broker tests of the regulations’ effectiveness, says food chemist Peter Snyder, president of the Hospitality Institute of Technology & Management, a Minnesota consulting firm that works with hotels and restaurants across the country. “Sending people to school and having them take a test doesn’t do any good. Because an inspector can’t come in and say, ‘You answered this question [correctly] on the test—why aren’t you doing it?’?”

Because cooking a steak the food-code way doesn’t exactly blend seamlessly into a kitchen’s choreography. A cook turns out maybe 100 steaks in a night, along with birds and lamb, mussels and pork. And he does it in the middle of a hot, oil-splattered chaos where time is always short.

The manual provided for Patino’s class is thick with regulations, but according to Snyder, the important ones can be boiled down to diligent post-potty washing and using the right thermometer. “I can get this stuff down to one page—all they really need to know,” he says. The FDA wants them “to know that salmonella comes out of a chicken—so what? You have to kill the stuff.”

And Snyder says that the regs need to specifically target those killing the stuff. “The FDA refuses to talk about the cook,” he says, complaining that often the person certified either isn’t in the kitchen or isn’t in the position to correct the chef, let alone stick a metal prong into his duck breast.

At downtown New American haunt Corduroy, Executive Chef Tom Power is almost certified. He took the classes and passed the exam but hasn’t obtained the necessary ID. “They told me not to lose my score,” says Power. “I lost my score.” Still, he doesn’t worry about the badge-totin’ authority of his certified general manager, morning sous chef, and morning garde-manger. “I know what I’m doing,” he says. When it comes to checking meat’s doneness, “I go by feel.” The only thermometers inspectors seem to care about, says Power, are the ones in the refrigerators.

21 P’s general manager, Dale Dykhuizen, says he’s worked under “one of the strictest” food codes around, in Suffolk County, N.Y. Even he scoffs at the idea of using a thermometer to cook meat. “Thermometers cause cross-contamination,” he says. “It is unrealistic to expect a grill cook to clean it between each time.” He also echoes Snyder’s assertion about the uselessness of gloves to prevent cross-contamination.

But it’s kind of like the power of a pebble in a shoe. “It’s actually really hard to shut down a restaurant permanently,” says Snyder. “The media has a lot more power than an inspector does.”

Patino knows that he can’t force his pupils to practice what they’ve learned in his class, so as a scare tactic, he invokes high-profile cases such as the hep-A outbreak at the now permanently shuttered Chi Chi’s, E. coli at Jack in the Box, and, of course, the recent spinach debacle. “One time, you kill someone, you send someone to the hospital, there goes your good reputation,” Patino tells them. CP