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Street, Southport, which is rated #24 of 266 restaurants in Southport also found bird faeces in the extractor fan and out-of-date lasagne.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.
Another day, another outbreak of Salmonella traced to some Master-Chef-inspired raw egg food porn.
Paddy Naughtin of the Whitehorse Leader writes that a bad batch of eggs is being blamed for 21 people being struck down by a Salmonella outbreak believed to have been picked up at a Blackburn restaurant.
The Department of Health and Human Services and Whitehorse Council are still investigating the cause of the outbreak which affected at least 21 people who ate at the Food Republic on Blackburn Rd on March 18.
Food Republic co-owner Vanessa Lekkas said she was “genuinely distraught” for those who had been affected and was “humbled by their understanding” .
“In almost 30 years of working in the industry we’ve never seen this happen,” Ms Lekkas said.
“We get hundreds of boxes delivered each week, and it looks like one of those contained a bad batch of eggs.
“We’ve been fully transparent with the council and health authorities, and they’ve seen our food handling processes are up to scratch.
“We’ve been told the investigation is now looking at the farms where the eggs came from,” Ms Lekkas said.
Ms Lekkas said the Food Republic would no longer be serving food made with raw egg products.
Why the fuck didn’t they stop years ago?
There’s been plenty of outbreaks, plenty of publicity, but, humans being humans, they think it won’t happen to them.
I get that.
So in the interest of public health, Australians, stop serving raw egg dishes.
And food porn chefs who are food safety idiots, fuck off.
I like butter on my bagels. So does Jan Polanik. According to the New York Times, he filed a pair of class-action lawsuits after paying a quarter for butter every time he ordered bagels over a four year period, but was given margarine without being told.
Dunkin’ Donuts franchise owners settled the suits, but not until after using food safety as a defense.
In 2013, a Dunkin’ Donuts spokeswoman, Lindsay Harrington, offered an explanation for why a vegetable spread might be used.
“For food safety reasons, we do not allow butter to be stored at room temperature, which is the temperature necessary for butter to be easily spread onto a bagel or pastry,” she told The Boston Globe. The recommended procedure in the store, she said, was for individual whipped butter packets to be served on the side of a bagel or pastry, but not applied. “The vegetable spread is generally used if the employee applies the topping,” she said.
Who says the space program hasn’t led to great inventions: Tang, Teflon, and GPS to track down taxi drivers in a public poo pandemic that’s leaving a group of business owners flushed with anger.
The situation has become so bad real estate agent Tim Simpson is considering relocating the business he’s run in the suburb for 40 years.
He said the final straw was catching a taxi driver “in the act” last weekend.
“I understand drivers are expected to work 24/7 but surely there’s better options than this,” he said.
“We’re the ones who are having to clean it up. It’s like living in the Third World.”
National taxi firm 13 CABS is investigating the claims by matching complaints against data from GPS devices fitted in taxis.
Head of client services Simon Purssey said he was “shocked and horrified” to hear the reports.
“I understand ‘when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go’ but if you’ve eaten a bad souvlaki and all of a sudden have to pull over you don’t do it in someone’s property,” he said.
And I thought Australia had great access to public shit depositories, compared to the rest of the world.
In this episode, Don and Ben talk about life hacks and things that might not be life hacks; Gwyneth Paltrow, cookbooks and Ben’s recent media experiences (and the perils of emailing while sitting on the toilet). Also in this episode the guys breakdown STEC in soy nut butter and Dixie Dew’s FDA 483 form plus a bonus on ROP cheeses.
A report by the UK Health Protection Agency concluded that 529 patrons paying a ridiculous amount of money for food-porn styled dishes were sickened with Norovirus – this at a restaurant that only seats 40 patrons per night — introduced through contaminated shellfish, including oysters that were served raw and razor clams that may not have been appropriately handled or cooked.
Investigators identified several weaknesses in procedures at the restaurant that may have contributed to ongoing transmission including: delayed response to the incident, the use of inappropriate environmental cleaning products, and staff working when ill. Up to 16 of the restaurant’s food handlers were reportedly working with Norovirus symptoms before it was voluntarily closed
Last night, Heston appeared on Australian current affairs program, The Project, and left hosts and viewers scratching their heads.
“What is it that makes a great restaurant?” Aly asked.
“This might seem a little tangential,” Blumenthal replied, which turned out to be the understatement of the year.
“Human beings became the most powerful species on the planet because through being able to imagine things that don’t exist we created shared beliefs. So all the things that happened after humans: religion, money, language, cultures, social media, fairy tales, they are very human being.
“The reason that happened was the brain trebled in size for lots of reasons but primarily through eating cooked food. It broke the food down and our gut changed and this [touches head] is on top of our body to protect, because this [touches neck] is where the next generation are prepared for life.”
Blumenthal’s answer was met with blank stares from The Project panelists, but the celebrity chef pushed on.
“And so the thing, we should be called omnivores or herbivores, we’re coctivores … we are interdependent beings,” he said.
“We’ve been able to work collectively in numbers larger than any other creature and our efficiency in group learning has become quicker, quicker, quicker, quicker. We don’t have to climb a mountain to get water every day, we don’t have to kill an animal to the death to feed our children.”
The Project’s resident smarty pants, Waleed Aly, interjected and said, “That explains why we like restaurants, but how do we tell the good ones from the bad ones?”
And Blumenthal was off again. “We have two universes,” he said.
“We have our internal universe, our human being and we have our human doing. We have our feelings and our emotions and then we have getting on in life … The problem that’s happening is we are confusing the two things. We are thinking that our happiness is going to be developed by a numerical system … thank god we have because that’s what’s got us to where we’ve got to.
(Hang in there, it’s almost over)
“There’s a palliative care nurse that wrote a piece in The Guardian last year, the most common things, regrets people had while they were passing away and it was they wished they lived a life true to themselves,” Blumenthal said.
“If every human being had an ambition not to have that feeling, and that’s because our new brain that came from eating cooked food … starts to fade and then our raw emotion comes through and we realise, actually, this is about emotion. Food is about emotion.”
Food is also about sustenance, enjoyment, socializing, and not making one barf.
Heston is a master of both food and words to make one barf.
Unpasteurized apple cider – a staple of the northern U.S. and Canadian fall festival circuit was blamed for causing more than 100 people to fall ill with cryptosporidiosis.
Nick Draper of My Journal Courier reports a lawsuit has now been files against several groups, including the Pike County Chamber of Commerce and the Barry Business Association.
Melissa Kinman of Quincy filed the civil action against Steven and Linda Yoder of Yoder Brothers Dairy Farm, the Pike County Chamber of Commerce and the Barry Business Association. In it, she contends the Yoders were selling and offering free samples of unpasteurized cider that was tainted with Cryptosporidium.
The outbreak sickened people ranging in age from less than 1 year old to 89 years old.
Health workers from Pike and Adams counties, the state and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began investigating reports of profuse or bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramping and vomiting. Tests done in December 2015 by the CDC confirmed there was cider contaminated with Cryptosporidium.
Cider was not sold at last year’s drive after officials decided to pull the product.
A list of cider and juice-related outbreaks — 84 outbreaks leading to over 3,500 illnesses going back to 1924 – is available here.
South Australia Health said a total 12 cases of food poisoning had been linked to the pies.
Food and Controlled Drugs director Doctor Fay Jenkins said salmonella was found in a raw egg wash that was applied to the pies only after they had been baked.
“We collected samples and we took swabs at the business and some of those samples came back positive with salmonella,” she said.
“We have to do a bit of forensic work. We have to be like detectives and do a bit more testing to get down to the exact strain that caused the outbreak.”
Dr Jenkins said SA Health was continuing to monitor the business.
“They are allowed to produce these pies but they are not allowed to sell them,” she said.
“They’re making the pies and we’re watching them carefully and making sure they are handled properly and the raw egg wash is not going to be used in the future.”
The outbreak of Salmonella infection from The Pork Pie Shop was linked to 12 cases in people aged 19 to 82, four of whom were hospitalized as a result.
SA Health said there had been four salmonella outbreaks caused by eggs so far this year and 246 people had been affected.
The coverage of extension associate Katrina Levine’s research on cookbook food safety messages took an unexpected turn yesterday. Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘people’ weighed in.
By ‘people’ I think it’s the folks who published her cookbooks.
It started with a string of emails from some folks in the UK who saw the NC State press release about the research. After analyzing 1700+ recipes from cookbooks on the New York Times best seller list we found that safe endpoint temperatures only appeared in just over 8% of the instructions.
Not great.
A few journalists want to know who are the biggest offenders are (quick answer: it’s pretty well everyone we looked at – but not all the time).
One of the books included in our study was Paltrow’s It’s All Good. In a flurry of questions, and without being able to find all the recipes online, I sent one of the enquiring minds a recipe from another book, My Father’s Daughter as an example of what we were looking at, with this note:
“Here’s one from chef Paltrow that does not have a safe endpoint temperature included (165F or 74C).
Heat oven to 400°. Mix butter, garlic salt, paprika, pepper and salt in a bowl. Rinse chicken inside and out; pat dry. Insert fingers between skin and breast to separate the two. Rub seasoned butter over chicken and under skin. Tuck wings underneath bird and tie together with a piece of twine. Tie legs together with another piece of twine. Place chicken on its side in a heavy roasting pan and roast 25 minutes. Turn onto its other side and sprinkle with several tbsp water; roast 25 minutes more. Turn chicken on its back; roast 10 minutes more. Turn on its breast; roast until skin is crispy and chicken is golden brown, 10 minutes more. Remove from pan and let rest, breast side down, 15 minutes, before carving (remove skin).”
The Paltrow folks responded, through the journalist with this:
“The recipe for “Roast Chicken, Rotisserie Style” was published in MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER in April 2011. While it did not have an endpoint temperature included, the directions called for the chicken to be roasted at 400F for 70 minutes, which is ample time to cook a 3-4 pound chicken.
IT’S ALL GOOD, which was published in April 2013, does include endpoint temperatures. “Super-Crispy Roast Chicken” in IT’S ALL GOOD is baked for 1-1/2 hours at 425 degrees and the recipe advises “The chicken thigh should register 165 degrees F on a digital thermometer at the very least (I usually let it get to 180 Degrees F just to be completely sure it’s cooked all the way through the bone).”
So we went back to the data – and yep, we noted that the Super-Crispy Roast Chicken had a safe end point temperature. What they omitted was that the first instruction in the recipe was to wash the chicken; one of the steps that can increase the risk of foodborne illnesses.
There were these other recipes from It’s All Good that don’t have the safe endpoint temperatures (and tell the reader to do non science-based things like touch it, look for clear juices or color to ensure doneness):
As for this comment, ‘the directions called for the chicken to be roasted at 400F for 70 minutes, which is ample time to cook a 3-4 pound chicken.’
Maybe, show me the data. Lots of variables that can impact the final temperature – starting temperature of the chicken, thickness, oven heat calibration.
Isn’t it just easier to tell folks what the safe temperature is and tell them to stick it in?
Food and Wine points out exactly what we found. It’s not just Gwyneth.
But for once, let’s cut Paltrow some slack. Out of the whopping 29 best-selling cookbooks these experts analyzed, only nine percent of them included specific temperature information. She’s in good company. Meanwhile, only 89 — 89! — of the 1,497 recipes included in the study were deemed instructionally safe.
Honestly, none of this seems too egregious, and we almost wish Paltrow didn’t have to deal with the PR headache.
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.
