After Restaurateurs' Lament, a Hint of Sympathy It was probably seeing "Casablanca" that made me think long ago that owning a cafe or a restaurant must be a dazzlingly glamorous way to go through life. Who wouldn't want to be Rick, with the world, not to mention Ingrid Bergman, coming to your doorstep? Soon enough, one learned that running a restaurant is difficult and often unrewarding work. Mostly what's at your doorstep is the specter of failure. So it was impossible not to feel some sympathy - just a twinge - for restaurateurs who went en masse to City Hall on Wednesday to vent their frustration with the letter-grading system imposed on them a year and a half ago by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The restaurant owners" lament, amplified by a chorus of City Council members at a heavily attended public hearing, had a few recurring themes. The health department's methodology of A, B and C grades, they said, was poorly constructed, inconsistently enforced, obsessed with minor infractions, and intended mainly to fatten the municipal treasury through heavy fines. "These people" - meaning health inspectors - "come into our premises as enemies," said Herb Wetanson, who owns the Dallas BBQ and Tony's DiNapoli restaurants. His industry, he said, is "under siege." Sympathy poured from Council members, including the speaker, Christine C. Quinn. Her staff distributed a survey in which two-thirds of 1,297 restaurateurs who filled out an online questionnaire rated the system as "poor." While the letter grades were "clearly an important consumer-protection tool," Ms. Quinn said, they were also riddled with shortcomings. She had "deep concerns," she said, that the fines were more about generating revenue than prodding restaurants to shape up. There is little question that the commissioner in charge of the grading program, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, can come across as the Cotton Mather of public health. Minions in his health department seem to see pathogenic menace everywhere, even in the communal cheese pot that was long a bar fixture at Sardi's and in the free-ranging cat Matilda at the Algonquin Hotel. No one is known to have ever keeled over from either the cheese or the cat. The air of righteousness about the health commissioner has no doubt rubbed some restaurateurs the wrong way. Their pique was hardly dispelled when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cast them as a bunch of whiners who were unperturbed if mice and cockroaches skipped across their floors and counters. Mr. Bloomberg, you fans of "Casablanca" will be shocked - shocked - to learn, can get all righteous himself. On Tuesday, in a preemptive strike against the Council hearing, he unveiled statistics showing that salmonella cases were down (by nearly 14 percent) and restaurant revenues were up (by 9.3 percent) since the grades were introduced in 2010. Welcome news, for sure. But the mayor could not keep from tumbling into one of his Louis XIV moods, saying he would entertain no suggestions to modify the system. "Their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears, I can tell you that," he said. Fits of dyspepsia notwithstanding, the Bloomberg administration has a strong case to make. For one thing, history is on its side. It is the reflexive nature of restaurateurs to say no to new regulatory ideas. Remember the ban on smoking, the restrictions on cooking with trans fats, the posting of calorie counts? All were initially greeted with gales of boos from the restaurant industry. All were adopted. All are now accepted as part of the natural order. Then, too, the restaurant owners managed to overlook a tiny detail in their presentations: the public likes the letter grades - by an overwhelming 85 percent, according to the most recent Zagat survey. Isn't looking out for the restaurant-going public what this is supposed to be about? So it's not surprising that the mayor and his commissioner take the grumbling with a grain of salt. At least they would do that if they weren't down on salt along with everything else.