Fancy food ain’t safe food: £72,000 fine for UK hotel

Add 5-star Frimley Hall Hotel to the embarrassingly long list of fancy-pants eateries that don’t know how to cook chicken to inactivate Campylobacter.

According to Camberley People, dozens of diners celebrating the marriage of a Mr and Mrs Dunsford fell ill after eating a contaminated Frimley Hall Hotelchicken liver parfait, served up at on May 28, 2011.

Now its operators have been ordered to pay a £72,000 fine and costs for the food safety breaches.

Macdonald Frimley Hall pleaded guilty on February 12 to two charges including serving the contaminated chicken dish.

The second charge related to a failure to identify potential food safety hazards that could arise from the parfait so that steps can be taken to reduce or eliminate risk.

Tim Pashen, the council’s executive head of community, said, “In this case, the parfait had been cooked at too low a heat and there was no recording system in place to check how long it had been held at the necessary temperature. The recipe was new to the hotel and no regard had been given to clear and publicised warnings from the Food Standards Agency concerning the need to undertake rigorous checks.”

The judge commented that the failures had resulted in an ‘entirely foreseeable outcome’. 

A Macdonald Hotels spokesman said: “Despite its five star food rating and its on-going due diligence the company would like to apologise for any distress that was caused to guests attending the function in question.”