SHANGHAI, May 4 Responding to the sweepingrecalls of pet foodin the United States and to worries about contamination in its own food supply, China said today that it has begun nationwide inspections to determine whether wheat gluten is being contaminated with chemicals, according to the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency.

A spokesman for the main export and import inspection agency, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said the inspections began on Monday. Regulators are testing for a chemical sometimes used as a rat poison, as well as for melamine, an industrial chemical that is believed to have killed or sickened thousands of pets in the United States and South Africa.

The report, which came during the countrys weeklong May holiday period, is the latest sign that China is beginning to cooperate with American investigators and is stepping up its efforts to determine what caused the problems with the pet food that was recalled in the United States.

In the early days after scientists traced the pet illnesses to wheat gluten in their food, the Chinese government initially denied that it had shipped any wheat gluten to the United States, and then insisted that even if there had been some melamine in one of its shipments, it could not have caused such harm to pets because it was not believed to be very toxic.

Since then, however, China has banned melamine, a chemical used to make plastics and fertilizer, from being mixed into vegetable proteins for export or for domestic food use.

And police officials in eastern China said on Thursday that they had detained the general manager of one of the two Chinese companies accused of selling contaminated wheat gluten to pet-food suppliers in the United States.

Investigators from the United StatesFood and Drug Administrationare visiting China now, trying to determine how and why melamine contaminated the wheat gluten and other ingredients that were sold to some of the worlds largest pet food makers.

Sampling and examination are under way, a spokesman for the Chinese regulators told the Xinhua news agency today. We will announce the results as soon as the investigation is completed.

By late in the day, however, the report of the nationwide inspections was being carried only in the English language versions of Xinhua and state-run newspapers like the Peoples Daily and China Daily not in the Chinese-language versions.

A spokesman from the state inspection office was not available for comment today. Most government offices were closed for the holiday period.

According to Xinhua, the inspections being carried out by the agency are looking for traces of melamine and aminopterin, a chemical sometimes used as a rat poison that was mentioned in the early going as a possible cause of the deaths of some pets. But regulators have never been able to confirm that aminopterin was present in contaminated pet food.

While wheat gluten has been a major locus of concern in the United States, the Chinese government said nothing today about testing corn or rice protein; those ingredients, too, have been identified as being contaminated with melamine and have been linked to illness in pets in the United States and South Africa.

Of course, the search for melamine in China could be an enormous undertaking, because animal feed producers have admitted in interviews here that they have been cheating customers for years by mixing melamine into animal feed.

Because melamine is high in nitrogen content, its presence artificially inflates the results of protein tests, even though it has no nutritional value. Buyers who depend on the tests get the mistaken impression that they are buying high-grade food or feed, when in fact their shipments are partly filled out with melamine, a cheap industrial chemical.

In recent weeks, several melamine traders, animal feed producers and chemical companies have said the practice of mixing melamine into food and feed additives is widespread in China. It is inserted in everything from baking flour and corn meal to fish feed, they say, and artificial coloring is also used to disguise one protein additive mixture as another.

Two Chinese companies were apparently the sources of all the melamine-tainted protein that found its way into pet food ingredients in the United States, and they are both located in eastern China, not far from the vast wheat-growing areas that are also centers for the production of melamine.

Both of the companies Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology had recently won contracts to supply pet-food ingredients to American and South African buyers.

It was 11:59 a.m., according to the report from the citys Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The first lunch reservations at Brasserie La C�te Basque, just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, were about to arrive. The inspector introduced himself to the hostess and headed straight for the kitchen, where he found Jean-Jacques Rachou, the restaurants owner and chef, at the stove.

Six and a half hours later, the inspector finished his evaluation and shut the place down. The next morning, we had a yellow sign in the window, Mr. Rachou says.

The city Health Department has closed 297 restaurants since the week ending Feb. 24. That was when a scene of rats teeming around a Taco Bell/KFC in Greenwich Village was captured on a widely disseminated videotape, a sight that triggered a tough new round of health department inspections. A vast majority of the restaurants have been reinspected and reopened.

But Mr. Rachou cannot bring himself to reopen the brasserie just yet. Of all the shuttered restaurants, this may be the one with the greatest reputation for the seriousness of its food and the profile of its chef.

While chefs at other restaurants said the brasseries code violations were fairly routine, the details of its closing reveal a very human clash of agendas and sensibilities, as well as a frustration and heartbreak that cannot be captured in a statistic. Mr. Rachou believes he was made an example of; the city denies that. While the chefs attitude may have played a role, it has certainly complicated the future of a restaurant with a rich pedigree.

The closing was on March 8. On March 30, the restaurant passed a new inspection with flying colors. But Mr. Rachou has yet to reopen; he says he is too depressed: The kitchen is ready, but the mind is not yet. Look, first I have to get over it. I need another two weeks to pull myself together. Maybe then.

In the meantime, his 40 or so employees have been out of work or working elsewhere and the restaurant has forfeited what industry observers speculate may be around $100,000 per week in revenues.

Mr. Rachou has salt-and-pepper hair (skewing salt) and a mustache, and at 71 he represents the ancien r�gime of the New York restaurant world as both a mentor over the years to many great chefs and as a stubborn personality type.

Across the regulatory divide from him was the inspector, Lalbachan Sukhu, a civil servant not much more than half Mr. Rachous age, under orders to leave no bain-marie unturned as he and his colleagues set about to systematically scrutinize every commercial kitchen in town.

Brasserie La C�te Basque, at 60 West 55th Street, is the renamed and more relaxed iteration of La C�te Basque, which Mr. Rachou, a classically trained chef from France, took over in 1979. He said his restaurants closing last month was a great shock.

When this happened, I was really destroyed, Mr. Rachou said, standing outside the restaurant, which was dark, its bentwood chairs stacked on tables.

I would say in the city, my kitchen is one of the 10 best, Mr. Rachou said. If not, it would go against my rules. They made an example of me.

He added: I dont deserve it. Maybe I deserve it. I dont know.

Restaurateurs and health department officials alike acknowledge that when an inspector calls, tensions run high. It can be a deadly experience, and what you dont want to do is let your emotions get away with you, said Steve Millington, the general manager of Michaels, the media-crowd hangout a few doors from Brasserie LCB.

Its like a cop giving you a speeding ticket, he said. Youll be there until the cows come home. Theres almost a petulance to the inspectors. You really need to shut up and be servile to them.

Mr. Sukhu would not consent to an interview. But Elliott Marcus, associate commissioner of the food safety bureau, said that his inspectors have found the crackdown period demoralizing as well. Theyre not exactly welcomed at these restaurants with open arms, he said.

Still, walking into Mr. Rachous kitchen during lunch service is a little bit like trying to measure the popes head for a new miter in the middle of high Mass: It struck him as intrusive.

Apparently, Jean-Jacques did not receive the man the way it should be done, said Andre Ihuellou, the brasseries manager. The inspector went around and around the kitchen. He went to the walk-in icebox. Then he made him throw a few ducks in the garbage.

Ten whole, cooked ducks, in fact, along with six cooked chickens and eight pounds of sausage and lentils, were registered at 48 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit and tossed out. The regulation maximum temperature is 41 degrees. Mr. Rachou estimates that he disposed of $50,000 worth of food.

Mr. Rachou recalled: I was not very fresh with the inspector. I just make him understand that from 10 oclock in the morning until 8 oclock at night I am busy cooking.

Mr. Sukhu continued his evaluation. Mr. Rachou ignored him. They say you are always supposed to accompany the inspector, because maybe you can explain things to him, but I was too busy, Mr. Rachou said. Next time.

When Mr. Rachou finished cooking lunch, the inspector was still in the restaurant, sitting in the dining room as he punched information into a hand-held computer.

I left at 3 oclock to take my nap, and when I came back three hours later, he was still here, Mr. Rachou said. I kept coming out of the kitchen: You finished? You finished? He said, No, there are somed�tails.

It was during the restaurants dinner service that Mr. Sukhu phoned a supervisor who, according to the health departments rules, must have spoken to his own supervisor and then informed Mr. Rachous ma�tre dh�tel that he was going to close the restaurant.

The restaurants hostess began to cry.

After pleading, Mr. Rachou was allowed to finish serving the customers who were already seated inside the 40-table restaurant. But then he made us lock the door, he said.

Mr. Sukhu had cited Mr. Rachous restaurant for 13 health code violations. Many of them were minor Choking first aid poster not conspicuously displayed in dining area, for example, and some cutting boards were noted to be badly worn but they added up to 80 points. A tally of 28 points or more is a failing score.

Brasserie La C�te Basque received 28 points on one violation alone, multiple instances of mouse activity: four dead mice and fresh and stale mice excreta observed in several storage areas. There were also a few roaches. If you lift every can, you find a cockroach, Mr. Rachou said. Its not a bank, its a restaurant.

Although restaurants that receive failing scores are often allowed to remain open while problems are remedied, Mr. Marcus, of the health department, said this one was shut down both for the seriousness of some of its violations and because it had a history of violations. A department spokesman, Andrew Tucker, said it had failed two other inspections in the past three years.

La C�te Basques history as a temple of both the haute (cuisine) and the high (society) is grand.Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,Frank Sinatraand Babe Paley all made the scene, and a chapter of Truman Capotes unfinished novel Answered Prayers was set there, a barely fictionalized and most unkind piece of social satire.

As a restaurateur, Mr. Rachou has survived any number of potentially devastating currents, from nouvelle cuisine to the restaurants move to the West Side in 1995 (its original location was one block east).

Like many institutions burdened with the warhorse label, Mr. Rachou and his restaurant struggled to grow old gracefully. While retaining its share of regulars, the restaurant also feeds a lot of tourists and business travelers. Mr. Rachous friends and colleagues say he had already been considering retirement, but he describes himself as reluctant.

Thats all I know to do: work, work, work, he said. Cooking is my life.

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warhorsealsowar-horse　n.軍馬; 〔話〕 老兵, 古つわもの; 老練家; 〔話〕 飽きられた作品［曲］.

1. A horse used in combat; a charger.
2. Informal.One who has been through many battles, struggles, or fights.
3. Informal.A musical or dramatic work that has been performed so often that it has become widely familiar.