Brisbane’s annual food hall of shame, released by City Hall on Wednesday, revealed the vast majority of the city’s worst food hygiene offenders had food preparation areas infested with rodents or pests last financial year.

Just more than $710,000 in fines were dished up to 34 recalcitrant cafe, restaurant and food outlet owners in 2013/14 – 28 of which had evidence of animal or pest infestation, according to Brisbane City Council’s lifestyle chairman Krista Adams.

But the restaurant that claimed the dubious title of the year’s most heavily fined, Pho Ha Long, a Vietnamese restaurant in Mount Gravatt East, was not among them.

The restaurant was slapped a $60,000 fine in November for two counts of handling and selling unsafe food.

It has since closed.

As has Kelvin Grove’s Little Lily Thai Restaurant, which was fined $32,500 in February on 29 offences, including animal and pest infestation, food storage, cleanliness and failure to comply with an improvement notice.

The inner city was not without its offenders either.

Rats were discovered in the kitchen of Japanese Bento in the Myer Centre food hall, which formed part of a raft of charges that earned it a $25,000 fine in November.

Also in the Myer Centre, the Beach House Bar and Grill copped a $30,000 fine on eight charges stemming from failed standards of food storage, cleanliness and maintenance.