Customers may have been getting more than cream cheese with their bagels at Nussbaum & Wu recently.
The popular café at 113th Street and Broadway was closed on Thursday after failing a routine sanitation inspection that morning.
Nussbaum racked up 59 violation points for “extensive unsanitary conditions, including vermin infestation, inadequate refrigeration facilities, and food contamination,” Department of Health and Mental Hygiene spokesperson Susan Craig said in an email. That’s more than double the amount of points needed for a “C” grade—the lowest grade given under the agency’s inspection system, where 0-13 points is an “A” and more than 28 points is a “C.”
Employees could be seen scrubbing empty food display cases and mopping floors on Thursday night. An employee said the café would open “maybe tomorrow.”
“If they correct all of the violations, they will have a re-opening inspection and then would be allowed to reopen if they have addressed all of the Health Department’s concerns,” Craig said.
Prapti Chatterjee, CC ’12, said she occasionally picks up pizza from Nussbaum and called the forced closure “horrifying.”
“I don’t frequent it, but it is the go-to place for breakfast,” she said.
Cameron Anderson, a West Harlem resident, was surprised to see the lights off when she went to Nussbaum to pick up some food.
“It’s like a totally popular place,” she said. “It surprises you, being a big place near Columbia.”
She said when the new inspection system began, requiring restaurants to post their sanitation grades prominently in their storefront windows, she and her husband nervously waited for a favorite local Mexican restaurant to get its grade.
“It’s sad, just one day the whole thing closed its doors, just like this,” she said.
Bank Street student Tracy Fine pointed at the “A” grade sign from Nussbaum’s inspection last October, posted three feet away from the official yellow “closed” sign from the DOHMH commissioner.
“I want to know how they got that grade,” she said.
Anderson said it’s a little unsettling to know that restaurant workers knew they were serving food to customers with rats around, but she’ll probably come back to Nussbaum for their bagels and cream cheese once they’re allowed to reopen.
“It’s gross,” she said. “But you also think, ‘I’ve been eating this for seven years and I’m fine.’”
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