Tag Archives: inspection

Popular NYC diner owner says inspector made up violations after being recorded

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In the classic he said/he said situation the owner of a popular New York diner, George’s, says that an restaurant inspector started making up infractions after the owner began documenting what he believed was an unfair inspection. According to the New York Post, owner Bill Koulmentas challenged some of the violations he was being cited for (including poor sanitation and temperature abuse of time/temperature control foods) and pulled out his iPhone when he felt the inspector was going to far. End result was 65 demerit points and a closure.

“They can do anything they want,” [Koulmentas] said. “Something’s out of control here. It’s lies, lies, lies.”
Koulmentas said the ordeal that prompted him to break out his cellphone camera began at about 9:30 a.m. yesterday, when Inspector Kenneth Reid began writing one trumped-up violation after another.
When the inspector crawled under a dishwasher and reported finding 13 roaches in the wall, Koulmentas said he did the same and couldn’t spot anything.

“I’ll give you $1,000 if you show me a roach,” Koulmentas protested.
Having experienced a similarly overzealous inspection a month earlier, Koulmentas said he decided to document what was happening.

Out came the iPhone.

Health Department spokesman John Kelly defended the inspection as legitimate, noting that George’s — which has been in business since 1950 — had accumulated 56 points under another inspector last month.
“The inspector recommended closing the place [back then],” reported Kelly. “The supervisor said let’s give him an opportunity to fix the problem. Basically, he caught a break.”

In August — barely five months ago — the eatery was awarded the top grade of “A.”

 

Diners who vomit up their $500 meals

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“There was one woman—it was a VIP tasting menu, I remember this: She just threw up on the table, in the middle of an extended tasting menu. They cleaned it up, and she “boot-and-rallied.” She finished the meal.”

That’s what one staffer told Christine Whitley of New York Magazine about the experiences in fancy-pants New York restaurant, Per Se.

“We can accommodate wacky people, and for the most part, 95 percent of the guests are well behaved. Then you have the couple that goes and has sex in the bathroom—that happens quite a lot. You have people who throw up—they throw up a lot. … You see people cheating on their spouses, overhear bits of conversation. …

"Spitting in the food doesn’t happen in New York restaurants. Honestly, people wouldn’t do that to the food. At Per Se, the cooks work 70 or 80 hours a week and make next to nothing, but they work because they want to cook. And to do that to something, to spit in prep work that someone has spent eight hours of work on—blood, sweat, and tears and all—it’s just not done. And if something drops on the floor, it gets thrown away. With the recent Department of Health crackdowns, those letter grades are bought—by that, I mean every restaurant that has an A has either an in-house specialist or a specialist they’ve hired. Before the DOH inspections, every high-end restaurant has four or five in-house inspections, and then everyone has their own set of fire drills—you put on hats and gloves when the inspector comes, you hide things away. …

“The staff is incestuous. I think half the staff is dating the other half of the staff right now. I mean, you spend 60 hours a week with these people, so what do you think is going to happen?”

UK kebab shop owners fined for food hygiene breaches

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The owners of a takeaway in Reigate, UK, have been hit with fines and court costs of £3,500 after breaching food health and safety rules.

The Reigate Kebab & Burger House in London Road, which has a food hygiene rating of zero out of five stars, was prosecuted by Reigate and Banstead Borough Council for "a string of serious food and health and safety offences."

The offences included allowing water to leak through a ceiling onto live electronics and storing and handling salad in a way that risked it being contaminated by raw meat.

Councillor Steve Farrer, executive member for safer communities, said, “Prosecution is always seen as a last resort, but unfortunately in this case it was brought due to the council’s previous measures failing to secure any long term improvement in food hygiene and health and safety standards. The council strives to ensure residents can expect the highest standards of food safety when eating out in the borough.”

Record 64 food outlets forced to shut in Ireland in 2011

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Rodent droppings, maggots on meat and putrid fish were just some of the nasties found by health inspectors in food businesses last year.

Documents obtained by the Irish Independent reveal how 2011 was the worst year on record for food safety infringements, with a record number of premises forced to close because they posed a grave risk to public health. Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) figures show that 64 restaurants, pubs, shops and other food businesses were served with closure orders last year — the highest tally since it was established in 1999.

But the statistics only tell part of the story, as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the gory details behind the closures.
Maggots and mouldy meat at one foodstore led to the closure of its butchery department in April.

An environmental health inspector issued a closure order that remains in force to the butchery section of Cahill’s foodstore in Crookstown, Co Cork, after discovering problems including dirty bloodstained walls and flies.

"Maggots were found on the meat debris collected in the tray under the cutting plate. The meat debris, which had not been removed for some time, was hard, dried out and clumped together and mouldy," the order stated.

Out-of-date food was a recurring problem at many outlets, with putrid meat and fish leading to a closure order being served on Charlie Stewarts/Seasons 52 in Parnell St, Ennis, Co Clare, in March.

"Large volumes of malodourous meat and fish were found in refrigerated storage, which had become putrid and were clearly in advanced stages of decomposition," the order said.

Bear meat café reopens; ‘I am preparing everything brand new, my chicken balls my egg rolls’

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The Mandarin Palace Restaurant in in Fredericton, New Brunswick (that’s in Canada), which was closed after rotting bear meat was discovered in a freezer, has reopened after a reinspection by Department of Health on Thursday.

There’s a note on the inspector’s report that says a food course must be completed as discussed with the business owners Johnny and Tina Tu.

"I will be reopened today," said Tu. "I am preparing everything brand new, my chicken balls and my egg rolls."

Tu said she sat down with government investigators to discuss how and why rancid parts of a black bear were found in her restaurant’s cooler. She told The Daily Gleaner she agreed to keep the bear for one of her customers, but the customer later told her to keep the bear.

Tu didn’t know what to do with it and was getting conflicting advice on how to dispose of it.

"I hope everybody understands that I never touched the bear. I didn’t eat it and I wouldn’t serve it to people," Tu said.

Tu said customers know that chicken is chicken and beef is beef.

"They can taste. They know. There’s the difference. I don’t want people to be scared. I didn’t touch anything with the bear," she said.

The Health Department said the condition of the bear meat created a high risk for cross-contamination. Officials told Tu and her husband Johnny — the restaurant’s co-owners — the cooler where the bear was stored had to be stripped bare of its contents and sanitized prior to reinspection. The department also said it would provide information on food-handling techniques and food safety.

Fancy food ain’t safe food: Chicago’s Alinea 3 Michelin stars, fails city inspection

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Fox News reports Chicago’s Alinea was given the Michelin Guide’s coveted three-star rating last month, the only Chicago restaurant to earn that top honor, but later in the month it failed an inspection by the City of Chicago’s food protection division.

Violations included foods at improper temperatures, employees not able to wash their hands properly, black mold growth inside an ice machine, and the front door was cited as not being insect or rodent-proof.

More food safety, less food porn.

That failing inspection report was listed as taking place on Nov. 30th. One week later, on Dec. 8, the restaurant was re-inspected and received a passing grade.

The second report did still mention a few issues, such as ventilation equipment that was needed, but it was a passing grade.

FDA faulted over state inspections

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is relying more often on states to inspect food plants but is failing to properly monitor those state inspections or follow through on their findings, the Department of Health and Human Services watchdog has concluded.

In a report released Wednesday, the department’s inspector general found that a lack of resources is forcing the FDA to lean more heavily on its counterparts at the state level to inspect plants responsible for everything from packing to processing foods.

More than half the agency’s inspections were done by state officials in fiscal 2009, up from 42 percent four years earlier, according to the report. If these inspections are not done properly, they can expose consumers to sometimes life-threatening illnesses.

A deadly salmonella outbreak linked to a Georgia peanut processing plant in 2009 occurred after the plant had been inspected several times by state officials working on the FDA’s behalf.

Wednesday’s report confirms several weaknesses in that relationship, almost all of which the FDA acknowledged were indeed problems. “The report documents glitches we’re aware of. . . . These are things we are working on,” said Mike Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods.

The report found that the FDA has failed to ensure that the states have completed the number of inspections assigned to them. Of the 41 states the FDA was working with in 2009, eight did not complete 10 percent of the 2,170 inspections they were responsible for that year. The agency paid for 130 of the inspections that were not done.

The report did not specify how much was paid in those instances. But it did state that the FDA spent more than $8 million for state contract inspections in fiscal 2009.

The FDA also did not do its part in monitoring the inspections as required by law, according to the report.

When audits were conducted, the most common problem cited had to do with the state inspectors’ inability to identify violations. At least 32 percent of the 419 inspectors audited had at least one deficiency. The report cited instances in which inspectors failed to note evidence of rodents or a leaky roof above exposed food.

Even when inspectors noted food safety violations, FDA officials who reviewed the inspectors’ reports did not properly classify all of them, the report said.

Officials responsible for 11 states said they did not classify some incidents as serious and in need of official action because they thought they were not allowed to, the report said.

Officials in another 11 states said that FDA was not always notified when actions were taken and therefore could not determine if the violations were properly addressed.

52 live roaches force temporary closure of Florida Burger King

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After finding more than 30 live roaches in a beverage machine, a state inspector issued a temporary emergency closure order for a Jacksonville Burger King last week.

Gary Mills of the Florida Times quotes from the inspector’s report:

• 52 live roaches found at “several areas throughout establishment,” including 8 on a glue trap in a storage area, 2 underneath the hot bun holding unit at the sandwich make station, 9 behind the ice cream machine and 33 inside the ICEE beverage machine.

During the Friday, Dec. 9 re-inspection before the restaurant’s re-opening, no violations were noted in the inspector’s report.

More training? Do more of same thing expecting different results crazy; Ottawa hospital cited for food-safety violations

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Public Heath found seven “critical” food-safety deficiencies at the Ottawa General Hospital this year, three of them in the last week.

On both Monday and Wednesday this week, inspectors found the hospital failed to “separate raw foods from ready-to-eat foods during storage and handling.”

The hospital also earned a critical deficiency for not having paper towels in a dispenser at a hand basin in the food-preparation area on Monday this week and on Aug. 19 of this year. On April 15, the citation was for having no soap in the dispenser at the washing station.

Frances Furmankiewicz, director of nutrition for the hospital, said the latest problems were due to “employee error.” Though all the employees are trained and certified to handle food, they were given more training as a result of the inspections.

A number of people at the hospital Thursday said they were concerned when they learned about the poor inspection results and said they would no longer eat there, including Cindy Gilman, who was at the hospital to pick up her daughter.

“I thought the hospital would have been great at following regulations — it’s a hospital,” she said.

Canadian prods horse with hockey stick; rapid Taiwanese animation decries return of horse slaughter in US

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Associated Press reported yesterday that horses could soon be slaughtered in the U.S. for human consumption after Congress quietly lifted a 5-year-old ban on funding horse meat inspections, and activists say slaughterhouses could be up and running in as little as a month.

Today, Taiwanese animation house NMA released one of their signature videos to address the situation.

Grub Street New York says things to watch for in the video are “the horse that gets zapped into a pile of money (we’re pretty sure that’s not how the slaughter actually happens) and the bloody Seabiscuit saddle at the French dinner table.”

I appreciated the Canadian slaughterhouse worker in a hockey jersey prodding a horse with a hockey stick.

Some background on the horse slaughter debate from AP; Australia also has two horse slaughterhouses.

Slaughter opponents pushed a measure cutting off funding for horse meat inspections through Congress in 2006 after other efforts to pass outright bans on horse slaughter failed in previous years. Congress lifted the ban in a spending bill President Barack Obama signed into law Nov. 18 to keep the government afloat until mid-December.

It did not, however, allocate any new money to pay for horse meat inspections, which opponents claim could cost taxpayers $3 million to $5 million a year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have to find the money in its existing budget, which is expected to see more cuts this year as Congress and the White House aim to trim federal spending.

The USDA issued a statement Tuesday saying there are no slaughterhouses in the U.S. that butcher horses for human consumption now, but if one were to open, it would conduct inspections to make sure federal laws were being followed.

Pro-slaughter activists say the ban had unintended consequences, including an increase in neglect and the abandonment of horses, and that they are scrambling to get a plant going – possibly in Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska or Missouri.

Sue Wallis, a Wyoming state lawmaker who’s the group’s vice president, said ranchers used to be able to sell horses that were too old or unfit for work to slaughterhouses but now they have to ship them to butchers in Canada and Mexico, where they fetch less than half the price.

The federal ban devastated "an entire sector of animal agriculture for purely sentimental and romantic notions," she said.

Although there are reports of Americans dining on horse meat a recently as the 1940s, the practice is virtually non-existent in this country, where the animals are treated as beloved pets and iconic symbols of the West.

A federal report issued in June found that local animal welfare organizations reported a spike in investigations for horse neglect and abandonment since 2007. In Colorado, for example, data showed that investigations for horse neglect and abuse increased more than 60 percent – from 975 in 2005 to almost 1,600 in 2009.

The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office also determined that about 138,000 horses were transported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter in 2010, nearly the same number that were killed in the U.S. before the ban took effect in 2007. The U.S. has an estimated 9 million horses.