Rachel Citron

Good morning, East Village.

Neighborhood restaurants are falling behind in the cleanliness stakes. In a report marking a year since letter grades were introduced, The Department of Health announced that 69 percent of restaurants received a grade A. In the East Village, 167 received top marks – that’s around 58 percent. City Room reports that Mayor Bloomberg thinks the system has been good for restaurant owners and diners alike.

EV Grieve picks over the agenda for next Monday’s meeting of Community Board 3’s SLA & DCA Licensing Committee, noting that the renewal for Heather’s will be a likely source of tension (its neighbors have complained about smoke and noise for years). Elsewhere on the restaurant front, DNA Info reports that next month an Israeli native, Zohar Zohar, will open Zucker Bakery, featuring Stumptown coffee and “cookies influenced by her European and Middle Eastern roots.”

The BMW Guggenheim Lab, which opens to the public on East First Street tomorrow, has its media preview today from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., and you can follow along on its Twitter stream. Its organizers have been soliciting contributions on how to make the city more comfortable. It has achieved this in its own right, to some degree, by driving the rats from the lot it inhabits. Perhaps BMW could be induced to build a few more pop-up galleries around Tompkins Square Park and solve the problem there, too.