Health inspectors who visited Salvatore’s Ristorante on Lord Street, Southport, which is rated #24 of 266 restaurants in Southport also found bird faeces in the extractor fan and out-of-date lasagne.
They also discovered utensils and fridge door seals encrusted in food debris and a large dead insect in a trifle.
Owner Salvatore Trecarichi, 66, of was today fined £750 by magistrates after pleading guilty to a string of food hygiene breaches.
South Sefton magistrates court was told council officers had visited the restaurant in June 2016 and found numerous hygiene issues. There was also no type of disinfectant product anywhere on the premises.
Trecarichi was given a 0 star hygiene rating and told to make improvements, but when inspectors returned a week later the bare minimum had been done.
Officers found areas were still unclean and greasy, with considerable damage to shelving and tiles.
On December 15, 2016 a further reinspection gave Salvatores a 3 star hygiene rating but when officers visited again on March 30 this year they were informed the business had changed its name.
This is an outstanding story by Nicole Jankowski, a freelance food, history and culture writer based in Detroit, who writes Duncan Hines, traveling salesman and future purveyor of boxed cake mix, considered himself an authority on a great many things: hot coffee, Kentucky country-cured ham and how to locate a tasty restaurant meal, in 1935, for under a dollar and a quarter.
In 1957, Duncan Hines and his wife, Clara, cut a cake at the Duncan Hines test kitchen in Ithaca, N.Y.
By the 1950s, Hines’ name would be plastered on boxes of cake mix; housewives would turn to his products for consistent quality and superior taste. Newspaper photographs featured Hines clad in a white chef’s apron, hoisting a neatly frosted cake or thoughtfully dipping a spoon into a mixing bowl.
But Duncan Hines wasn’t a chef — in truth, he could barely cook. For most of his career, he had just been a businessman, desperate for a decent meal on the road. Through his search for the best restaurants across America, he became an accidental gourmand, an unlikely author and homegrown connoisseur.
Although boxed cake mix is the legacy that most people now associate with Duncan Hines (only after asking, “Was he actually a real person?”) the supermarket foods that bear his name are only an epilogue to a storied life traveling America’s back roads.
It was really his book, Adventures in Good Eating, that first put Duncan Hines on the map. And it was his tireless pursuit of good food that inspired his book.
Hines’ appreciation for a good meal arose out of mere necessity. From the 1920s through the ’40s, he motored across the country hawking letter openers and paperclips and subsisting on unreliable road food. It was an era long before any formal restaurant rating system existed in the U.S. The names and locations of good restaurants were conveyed by word of mouth; for an out-of-town traveler, locating a decent supper was often a daunting and discouraging mission. And although Europe had relied on The Michelin Guide since 1900, middle America in the 1920s and ’30s was still a land of culinary mystery and inconsistency.
Desperate for a clean place to dine, Hines became an investigative epicurean and self-made restaurant critic. He carried a tiny journal in his coat pocket, jotting down the precise locations of his favorite places. No restaurant was off limits for the inquisitive Hines. “The kitchen is the first spot I inspect in an eating place,” he wrote. “More people will die from hit or miss eating than from hit and run driving,” he joked — though Hines clearly thought food safety was no laughing matter.
He frequently popped into the kitchen to scrutinize how staff handled food and then swung around back to investigate the restaurant’s garbage pile. He meticulously recorded the names of the most pristine diners, the inns with the tastiest prime roast beef, and where to find the stickiest honey buns. He appreciated regional cuisine, quickly discovering in which part of the country to brake for broiled lobster tail (New England) and where to stop for fried chicken (Kentucky).
Hines noted whether a restaurant had air conditioning, its hours of operation and its prices for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “His restaurant notes were extraordinarily accurate,” says Louis Hatchett, author of the book, Duncan Hines: How a Traveling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in Food. “As word spread among his family and friends, people were begging him to share the list he had created. There was nothing out there like it,” he says. “In 1935, sick of being pestered, he finally sent out a little blue pamphlet in his Christmas cards, containing a list of 167 restaurants across 33 states that he could safely recommend.”
Soon, Hines was receiving postcards from from salesmen, newlyweds and other travelers all over America seeking his recommendations for good, clean restaurants.
In 1936, at 55, Hines self-published his first edition of Adventures in Good Eatingand sold them for $1 each. It contained the names and locations of 475 restaurants from coast to coast that had Hines’ rigorous seal of approval. “The books were sold through word of mouth, but they quickly sold out. The following year he raised the guide’s price to $1.50 — and that’s where the price would stay for the next 25 years,” explains Hatchett.
“Recommended by Duncan Hines” became the gold standard in dining by the 1950s.
Two years before his death in March of 1959, the entire franchise was sold to Procter & Gamble.
Hines often said, “Nearly everyone wants at least one outstanding meal a day.” This seems as true now as it did a half-century ago. But long before Yelp or TripAdvisor offered restaurant reviews with the click of a button, Hines was doing it his own way, by traveling the highway with his pencil and notebook, changing the way America ate on the open road — one adventure at a time.
Tanu Kulkarni writes in The Hindu, the next time you spot a pani puri wala using unhygienic water or find that the food in your school canteen is not fresh, take a photograph or a video of the food safety violation and send it on WhatsApp to the Department of Health and Family Welfare and your complaint is as good as registered.
The department has decided to work with resident welfare associations (RWAs) in the city to spread awareness about safe and unsafe food and also look into complaints pertaining to food safety. Subodh Yadav, Commissioner of the department, said active volunteers will also be given an identity card so that they are taken seriously. The department’s local officials will be given a three day deadline to attend to the complaint. Apart from flagging off the department about these complaints, citizens can also raise awareness about food safety practices among others.
RWAs have welcomed the move. Nitya Reddy, vice-president, Richmond and Langford Town Residents’ Welfare Association, termed it a much needed one. “It will be great if the Health Department ropes in RWAs as we will be able to point out to unhygienic neighbourhood eateries, restaurants, and roadside vendors. We can be in constant touch with them and help them monitor food quality.”
The restaurant inspection system in Brisbane is hopeless beyond belief.
For a cow town that wants to profit from tourism rather than coal and cattle, they are beyond stupid about it.
At least we got good folks to coach the little kids in hockey.
The disclosure system is voluntary. If a restaurant gets two-stars-out-of-five, for example, they don’t put up the sign.
How is it that Toronto, LA, NYC and hundreds of other places figured out how to make restaurant inspection disclosure mandatory, yet Brisbane and most of Australia go on a faith-based system – which usually involves someone blowing someone.
According to the Courier Mail,the parents of a Brisbane city councillor have admitted breaking food safety laws enforced by the council, with inspectors finding cockroaches “happily living” in the carvery they run in a city foodcourt.
Paddington councillor Peter Matic’s parents Milovan and Milena Matic were slapped with fines after a council health inspector unearthed issues with cleanliness, maintenance and cockroaches at their Carvey and Seafood in the Myer Centre in January last year.
The couple were fined $3000 each after pleading guilty to failing to ensure the business complied with the food Act.
The company, Nano Investments Pty Ltd, also copped a $29,000 fine for five counts of failing to comply with the food standards code.
Kevin Cartledge, for Brisbane City Council, said officers inspected the eatery on January 19, 2016, and issued an improvement notice.
So a whole bunch of people ate at that shitshow after the Jan. 19, 2016 inspection, but no one bothered to tell customers.
It’s some perverse British legal system thing, that potentially puts consumers at risk for months after the failings are discovered.
When they returned two days later, the officers discovered the business was still breaching food safety laws, triggering a suspension the following day.
He said the most concerning element was the presence of a large number of cockroaches.
“You have, essentially, the perfect circumstances for cockroaches to live and breed,” he said.
“Given that there were adult and juvenile cockroaches in the premises, it clearly suggests that there was a life cycle and these cockroaches were happily living and feeding.”
He pointed out the company has had compliance issues in the past, and infringements notices had been served.
“This is a company that has been put well and truly on notice yet has still failed to comply with their requirements under the Act,” he said.
So why the fuck wouldn’t you make it public to warn unsuspecting consumers that the place was a shithole?
Too much monkey business.
Going public: Early disclosure of food risks for the benefit of public health
NEHA, Volume 79.7, Pages 8-14
Benjamin Chapman, Maria Sol Erdozaim, Douglas Powell
Often during an outbreak of foodborne illness, there are health officials who have data indicating that there is a risk prior to notifying the public. During the lag period between the first public health signal and some release of public information, there are decision makers who are weighing evidence with the impacts of going public. Multiple agencies and analysts have lamented that there is not a common playbook or decision tree for how public health agencies determine what information to release and when. Regularly, health authorities suggest that how and when public information is released is evaluated on a case-by-case basis without sharing the steps and criteria used to make decisions. Information provision on its own is not enough. Risk communication, to be effective and grounded in behavior theory, should provide control measure options for risk management decisions. There is no indication in the literature that consumers benefit from paternalistic protection decisions to guard against information overload. A review of the risk communication literature related to outbreaks, as well as case studies of actual incidents, are explored and a blueprint for health authorities to follow is provided.
One of my former roommates was a straight edge punk-loving vegan for a while. Now he eats meat and drinks beer, but for a while he survived on rice and sriracha. Sometimes he left his steamed rice out overnight – making some egg-free fried rice the next day. This was before either of us knew much about Bacillus cereus and rice.
Earlier this week Claire Lower from Lifehacker emailed a couple of questions about leftover rice safety. The Lifehacker folks often ask really good questions about the science and why behind food safety recommendations – Claire included. Claire wanted to know why some guidelines say not to leave rice out on the stove over night.
I sent Claire a couple of papers including this one which is an oldie (1974), but a goodie from Gilbert and colleagues which included this awesome B. cereus spore/vegetative cell growth figure (right, exactly as shown) highlighting anincrease of a log or more within 4 hours once in vegetative state.
We looped Don into our discussion and he pointed out the somewhat common practice of boiled and then fried rice in some Asian cooking techniques.
According to Benjamin Chapman, Food Safety Specialist from North Carolina State University, cooking rice doesn’t necessarily kill all the pathogens that may be lurking about. “The issue with rice,” he explained to me over email, “is that one pathogen, Bacillus cereus, is quite prevalent in dried rice (some sources say ubiquitous), likely as spores. The spores may survive cooking. If cooked rice is subsequently held at room temperature, the spores can come out of their protective form, germinate, and vegetative forms multiply. The cooked rice environment provides a lot of water and nutrients for growth. As a by-product of growth, they create a couple of toxins, including a heat-stable one.”
Beyond refrigerating any home-cooked rice, a sense of vigilance is helpful when dining out. According to food scientist Donald Schaffner of Rutgers University, some restaurants “cook up a large batch of rice, hold it at room temperature all day,” and then take portions from the batch as needed. “Because Bacillus makes a heat stable toxin,” he explained “this is not a best practice, and has led to outbreaks in the past.” “Heat stable” means that the toxin can survive boiling and, once the rice is cooled into the “danger zone” of 59-122°F, the bacteria can multiply, making even more of the toxin. Sushi rice, he noted, shouldn’t be a problem as vinegar is added to lower the pH, allowing it to be held safely at room temperature.
There’s an outbreak of Salmonella in Canberra (that’s Australia’s capital, on a swamp, like Washington, DC), and there’s an outbreak in Brisbane.
They are not related, other than no one will say something in public.
The whole idea of risk communication is to let people know when there is a problem, what they can do to avoid the problem, and stop making things worse by refusing to ID the source or the food implicated.
It’s OK, social media will fix that for the bureaucrats, but why spend taxpayer money on agencies that won’t tell the public shit?
I called Queensland Health a week ago, to ask them about the Chinese New Year Salmonella outbreak in Brisbane, and the media thingy said, e-mail your question, which I did, and still, no answer.
Which is why I always tell private sector types to expect nothing from the government.
If there’s an outbreak, the government types will still have their job and super: you won’t.
According to ABC News two weeks ago – and there’s been nothing public since — an outbreak of salmonella has forced two popular Canberra cafes to close their doors while they are investigated by health inspectors.
The ACT Government Health Protection Services (HPS) has served prohibition orders on the two cafes linked to the outbreak, located in Belconnen and Gungahlin.
The cafes are Ricardo’s in Jamison and the Central Cafe in Gungahlin.
In a statement, HPS said health inspectors had uncovered problems “related with food handling processes and procedures” at both stores.
“The cafes will be closed until such time as the identified issues have been rectified,” the statement said.
“This action means that there is no ongoing risk to the health of the ACT population from these events”.
The health directorate refused to comment on how many people had been affected by the outbreak while the investigation was in process.
Though there were a number of posts on social media from those claiming to have eaten at Ricardo’s before falling ill.
“I know someone who was in hospital last week, for four days, with a truly awesome bout of salmonella after eating there,” one person wrote on Facebook.
“My partner and I are both in hospital,” wrote another.
“Bought cake from there Monday last week, was shivering in bed with fever and food poisoning with girlfriend until Friday, she’s fine I’m still not over it,” a user said on Reddit.
“Ugh ate there Wednesday last week. Friday, got sick/gastro for 5 days. Guess I have an idea where it came from now…”
Our resident non-aging television personality and food safety dude, Rob Mancini, who did a MSc with me all those years ago, writes that food safety professionals have been using a number of different mediums to get the word out on food safety.
One such medium are blogs, like the one you are reading now, using current press releases to disseminate information to the masses. Others use eclectic marketing campaigns, some which are validated others not, radio, Internet, and TV.
While I am a proponent in using media to get information out in a rapid, relevant manner, TV reality shows can be misleading and often times food safety takes a back seat to sensation.
TV reality shows are a fine balance between science and fiction….. it’s about the ratings and trying to get a second season. Prior to embarking on my journey with Kitchen Crimes back in 2005, I was bombarded with emails from my colleagues not to sensationalize the facts and use weird gadgets to uncover dirt, grime, or whatever was lurking in the kitchen. Except hat doesn’t get ratings, sometimes we have to sensationalize and grasp peoples’ attention.
But it has to be done right. At least it gets people talking and thinking about food safety.
I watched from the diner counter as my server bare handedly took bread from the storage drawer, toasted it, cut it, and put it on a plate. The manager who had been answering phones and rubbing his face while adjusting his glasses also made toast and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel that then disappeared to wipe something else down.
No imagination needed to see how something like E. coli or Norovirus could be spread as I watched each bit of contact affect all the bread, knives and surfaces.
Am I neurotic? I tried not to have a stomachache.
I just want toast.
Rebecca Fischer (laughingkat2@gmail.com) says she’s in the middle of a career change, following my passion for food by studying nutrition. Food handling has become a fascination, another excuse for people-watching, to see how experience and education affect awareness in kitchen behavior.
And I may be on hiatus but I’m a sucker for helping students who want to learn and kids –little or big — who want to play hockey.
The New Mexico Environment Department says the diner — until recently called the Bad Ass Sandwich Shop but now called the Kick Ass Sandwich Shop because of a legal dispute, see the NSFV video below – will be served with a notice of violation for not having a catering permit.
Paul Rhien, a spokesman for the Health Department, said Friday that epidemiology tests confirmed the contamination came from the restaurant’s food.
Shannon Quintana of Kick Ass Sandwich Shop couldn’t be reached for comment Friday. He told the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper that he didn’t cater the Dec. 14 lunch and that the Health Department had ordered food from Kick Ass to be served alongside other dishes brought by employees.
But Rhien told Mark Oswald of the Albuquerque Journal the restaurant set up a buffet line and served food, and there weren’t many food items prepared by Health Department workers.
The Health Department’s holiday lunch, which was held in the department’s offices at the Runnels Building – where employees headquartered there are the same ones who investigate disease outbreaks around the state – resulted in “reports of a number of employees becoming ill with mild gastrointestinal illness,” according to a message sent to employees Monday by Health Secretary Lynn Gallagher.
More than 200 department workers are estimated to have attended and about 71 reported gastrointestinal symptoms that developed within 24 to 48 hours.
Rhien said Friday that the Department of Health was not aware the sandwich shop didn’t have a catering permit. “If a restaurant doesn’t have the appropriate permit, we would expect them to refuse our request to cater an event — just as anyone would expect,” he said in an e-mail.
“The lab results from our epidemiological investigation confirmed that Clostridium perfringens bacteria were the source of the outbreak.”
The holiday lunch was paid for with worker contributions to an employee events committee, not by taxpayers, Rhien said.
“All prepared food was disposed, food handling practices were reviewed, and all staff who handle food were tested at least twice for the bacteria,” according to a release from Healthy Chicago, an initiative of the Chicago Department of Health, said at the time the outbreak was reported.
Carbón withdrew from the Taste of Chicago so that it could turn “its full attention to addressing the issues at its Bridgeport location,” health officials said.
The owners also closed their second location at 810 N. Marshfield “out of an abundance of caution.” That location reopened July 9, health officials said.
Lab tests confirmed 69 people were sickened during the outbreak, with another 37 probable cases. Of the sick people, 22 had symptoms so severe that they required hospitalization. Illness onset dates ranged from June 3 to July 23.
Cilantro is the suspected source of the E. coli based on percentages of sick people who ate menu items made with the fresh produce item. Inspectors collected 12 food items, including cilantro, but none of the food returned positive results for E. coli bacteria. The cilantro was sourced from Illinois and Mexico, according to traceback information provided to the health department.
“Lettuce was associated with illness in both multivariable models but was consumed by only 44 percent of cases,” according to the health department report.
“In comparison, cilantro was consumed by 87 percent of cases, and either cilantro or salsa fresca (which included cilantro) were consumed by 95 percent of cases.”
The report references “several critical violations” observed during a July 1 inspection, such as improper temperatures for several food items including red and green salsas, tequila lime sauce, raw fish, guacamole and cheese. Inspectors also noted improper hand hygiene practices among food handlers.
Health inspectors who visited Salvatore’s Ristorante on Lord Street, Southport, which is rated #24 of 266 restaurants in Southport also found bird faeces in the extractor fan and out-of-date lasagne.
